Number 130 • Mar / A pr 2014 • $8.95
Illuminates Realpolitik’s Origins
John B. Judis Debunks Maximalism
Robert W. Merry Assesses America’s Destiny
Bernard Wasserstein Appraises Zionism
John J. Mearsheimer Warns Taiwan
John Bew www.nationalinterest.org
THE GOP’S
BALANCING ACT
Reinventing the Party
Paul J. Saunders
Republican Fight Club
Henry Olsen
Number 130
.
March/April 2014
The Realist
5
Asia First by Robert W. Merry
Articles
9
The GOP’s Identity Crisis by Paul J. Saunders
20
The Republican Battlefield by Henry Olsen
America’s Pacific position has long been intrinsic to its national character. For Washington to deal
skillfully with China’s ascent will require more than rhetoric about a pivot to Asia; it will demand
actual pivoting.
It’s time to reinvent the Republican Party. Without corrective action, it may face yet another
defeat in 2016. Still, there is a clear path that the gop can follow to regain its former luster.
Finding the way ahead requires an honest assessment of where the party is today.
The conventional wisdom is that the gop 2016 presidential race will boil down to a joust between
the “establishment” and the “insurgents.” Not so. In fact, victory will likely go to the candidate
who understands and exploits the true divisions between the party’s four factions.
29
Taiwan’s Dire Straits by John J. Mearsheimer
Farewell Taiwan. Unless China falters, Taiwan is likely doomed. An increasingly powerful China
will probably attempt to push the United States out of Asia, much the way the United States
pushed the European great powers out of the Western Hemisphere.
40
The Real Origins of Realpolitik by John Bew
Realism is back. But while realpolitik, which can be traced back to the doughty nineteenthcentury German liberal Ludwig von Rochau, may be enjoying a new vogue, a look at the
evolution of the term, down to the Obama administration, reveals that it is more often abused
than accurately employed. True realpolitik is suspicious of utopianism, not idealism.
53
Frack to the Future by Leonardo Maugeri
The U.S. shale-oil boom is not a temporary bubble but a long-term, transformational
phenomenon. Yet while shale oil may bring more energy security to the United States, it cannot
bring energy independence. Thinking otherwise can only lead to a rude reawakening.
61
Low-Tech Terrorism by Bruce Hoffman
Terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda are continuing their efforts to acquire weapons of mass
destruction. But although this remains a threat we should take seriously, the greater danger
comes from the same basic weapons systems terrorists have relied on for over a century: the gun
and the bomb.
Reviews & Essays
72
Max Americana by John B. Judis
Stephen Sestanovich provides an ambitious history of U.S. foreign policy since World War II
in his new book Maximalist. His dichotomy between maximalism and retrenchment, however,
ignores the fact that many administrations have practiced both when convenient.
78
The Enigma of Mr. X by Christian Caryl
George F. Kennan was the wisest of the wise men, a profound thinker who had a tragic sense
of history—particularly in the atomic age—that his coevals lacked. His newly published diaries
reveal someone who was also morbidly suspicious of American democracy. But we condemn
Kennan and those like him at our own risk.
87
Revisiting Zionism by Bernard Wasserstein
John B. Judis offers a sweeping interpretation of Zionism in America. He decries Washington’s
“pattern of surrender to Israel and its supporters” going back to Harry Truman. But his history
overstates the sway and influence of the pro-Israel lobby, which is powerful but is not and has
never been omnipotent.
Images Shutterstock: pages 11, 16, 24, 28, 32, 35, 37, 55, 58, 63, 70, 90, 93;
Wikimedia Commons: pages 43, 46, 49, 51, 66, 74, 77, 80, 83, 86
Published by
The Center for the National Interest
Charles G. Boyd Chairman
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Political Editor
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The Realist
Asia First
By Robert W. Merry
O
n February 7, 1845, Congressman
John D. Cummins rose in the
House of Representatives to add
his voice to those clamoring for U.S. possession of the Oregon Territory, then occupied
jointly by the United States and Britain. He
declared that these opulent Northwest lands
were “the master key of the commerce of
the universe.” Put that territory under U.S.
jurisdiction, he argued, and soon the country would witness “an industrious, thriving, American population” and “flourishing
towns and embryo cities” facing west upon
the Pacific within four thousand miles of
vast Asian markets. Contemplate, he added,
ribbons of railroad track across America,
connecting New York, Boston and Philadelphia to those burgeoning West Coast cities
and ports.
Furthermore, he said, the “inevitable
eternal laws of trade” would make America
the necessary passageway for “the whole
eastern commerce of Europe.” European
goods, traversing the American continent,
could get to Asia in little more than
seven weeks, whereas the traditional sea
routes generally required seven months.
“The commerce of the world would
thus be revolutionized,” said Cummins.
Robert W. Merry is the political editor of The
National Interest and an author of books on
American history and foreign policy.
The Realist
“Great Britain must lose her commercial
supremacy in the Pacific; and the portion of
its commerce which forced its destination
there must pay tribute to us.”
C u m m i n s’s s p e e c h r e f l e c t e d a
fundamental reality about America: its
quest for expansion and national grandeur
was pretty much irrepressible. There were,
as always, the naysayers and critics. Henry
Clay argued for confining American
settlement to lands east of the Rocky
Mountains and postponing occupation
of Oregon for some forty years. But most
Americans recoiled at such a cramped view,
and Clay’s similarly blinkered opposition
to the annexation of Texas probably cost
him the presidency in 1844. If America
was a country of vast designs, as Emerson
said, then its westward push, known then
and now as Manifest Destiny, was never
destined to stop at the Pacific.
This history is worth pondering in
the aftermath of China’s declaration last
November that its so-called air defense
identification zone now encompassed most
of the East China Sea. U.S. secretary of
defense Chuck Hagel promptly called the
action “a destabilizing attempt to alter the
[region’s] status quo.” And Paul Haenle,
director of the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center
for Global Policy at Beijing’s Tsinghua
University, warned that the move could
set China on a collision course with Japan
over disputed islands in the area. China’s
provocation, he said, renders “the already
dangerous area surrounding the islands even
more ripe for an inadvertent collision.” Such
a collision almost inevitably would draw in
America, given its defense treaty with Japan.
March/April 2014 5
America has considered its Pacific dominance to be
a national birthright almost from the time it first
conceived of itself as a potential transcontinental nation.
It wasn’t surprising that commentators
and analysts would see China’s action, and
the tensions it could unleash, as a harbinger
of growing hostility between China and
the United States over which country will
dominate East Asia. Many see the situation
as a classic confrontation of the kind that
ensues when a rising power challenges an
established power—as when, for example,
Rome challenged Carthage, Britain
challenged Spain, America challenged a
reduced Spain and Wilhelmine Germany
challenged Great Britain for preeminence.
As the bbc’s Jonny Dymond put it,
“For seven decades the US has been the
dominant military power in the region.
China has given Washington notice that
change is afoot. Peaceful management of
that change is one of the great strategic
challenges of the 21st Century.”
Dymond has a point. But it doesn’t
capture the extent to which America has
considered its Pacific dominance to be a
national birthright almost from the time
it first conceived of itself as a potential
transcontinental nation. Cummins’s
prophecy, in other words, was widely
shared.
C
onsider America’s attitude toward Hawaii. Even before California entered
the Union in 1848, President John Tyler
declared that no foreign power except the
United States should control Hawaii—what
might be called the Tyler Doctrine. These
strategically positioned islands, in effect,
belonged to America’s sphere of influence.
Presidents James Polk and Zachary Taylor
affirmed this doctrine. Then, even as the
6 The National Interest
country struggled with the explosive issue of
slavery, President Franklin Pierce’s secretary
of state, William Marcy, negotiated an annexation treaty with Hawaii’s King Kamehameha III, which was aborted only by the
king’s untimely death.
After the Civil War, American officials
renewed their interest in gaining dominance
over Hawaii. An 1876 effort to craft a
reciprocal trade agreement hit a snag in
the U.S. Senate until negotiators inserted
a provision that Hawaii could not lease or
grant any “port, harbor, or territory” to a
third-party nation.
Two decades later America’s interest
intensified with some big naval
developments—the advent of coal-fueled
steam power, armored ships and longrange guns with explosive shells. Hawaii,
possessing the only protected harbor in the
North Pacific, suddenly became a “Pacific
Gibraltar,” as historian William Michael
Morgan put it in his book of that title. If
the United States could dominate Hawaii,
which was the only feasible staging area for
an Asian attack on America, it could greatly
enhance its security; without it, menacing
raids and challenges would be a constant
threat. Conversely, with Hawaii, America
could project power and influence far into
Asia; without it, U.S. power projection
would be infinitely more difficult.
Alfred Thayer Mahan’s famous book, The
Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–
1783, laid out the lineaments of America’s
embryonic naval strategy. It was largely a
historical treatise, but to enhance the book’s
sales potential Mahan added a section on
the strategic challenges and opportunities
The Realist
of the United States as seen through the
prism of sea power. America, he wrote,
could produce vast surpluses of goods. It
should pursue three goals: moving beyond
its traditional focus on domestic markets
and protective tariffs by promoting overseas
trade; developing a capacity to protect sea
lanes and trade routes; and creating a robust
navy capable of projecting power into
strategic areas of the world.
Few books have captured the American
consciousness as powerfully as Mahan’s
volume, which was heralded as a blueprint
for the countr y’s future. Theodore
Roosevelt proclaimed it “by far the most
interesting book on naval history which
has been produced on either side of the
water for many a long year.” Overseas it
was a sensation. Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm
ordered that a copy be conspicuously
displayed on every ship in his growing navy.
Mahan’s book, though not precisely a
new strategic vision for America, brought
coherence and power to strategic impulses
and ambitions that had been percolating
within the American polity for generations.
But the timing was propitious because a few
years later, when America found itself at
war with Spain over the destabilization of
Cuba under Spanish rule, the country was
ready to exploit the war and seize strategic
territories according to Mahan’s formula.
America was succumbing to the imperial
temptation.
Of course, opposition voices,
including Mark Twain’s, decried the
new expansionism and warned of its
consequences. Many of these arguments
were salient and prescient. But the country
The Realist
wanted empire and Washington ignored the
adjurations of the anti-imperialists. A half
century later, when it crushed Japan and its
sparkling navy, the United States emerged
as the unchallenged regional hegemon.
S
ince then, Americans have, by and large,
credited themselves with handling the
responsibilities of their country’s Pacific
dominance with moderation and wisdom,
serving as a stabilizing influence, and protecting the commercial and geopolitical interests of less powerful nations in a more or
less disinterested and fair-minded manner.
It’s a valid appraisal when placed in the perspective of history.
But China sees it differently. It views
the region’s international system as the
baleful creation of an outside force whose
legitimacy as an Asian power is questionable
and whose presence thwarts its own
national self-realization. Thus, we are likely
to see further challenges similar to China’s
declaration of its air defense identification
zone. Indeed, Beijing has signaled that
further declarations are coming. Ultimately,
it seems, China wants to push America
back—back to Hawaii.
For America, the geopolitical stakes in
this face-off are big. But the psychological
stakes are possibly even bigger. That’s
because the country’s position in the Pacific
is wrapped up in its national identity, in
its destiny concept going back far beyond
the mere seven decades of its regional
dominance following World War II. It goes
back to America’s first stirrings of ambition
when Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, Tyler’s
annexation of Texas and Polk’s westward
March/April 2014 7
push to the Pacific helped to forge a
budding superpower. Thus, it isn’t accurate
to say that, without its role in the Pacific,
America would be the same country, only
one shorn of a Pacific role. It would be an
entirely different country, bereft of a central
element of its national consciousness going
back at least to the 1840s.
But, if America’s Pacific position is
indeed intrinsic to its identity, Washington
hasn’t conducted itself in recent years as
if it comprehends the challenge. Quite
the contrary. It has squandered blood
and treasure, and sapped its economic
strength, with civilizational wars in the
lands of Islam, where the definitional and
strategic imperatives are much less salient.
It has otherwise undermined its economic
fortitude by piling on public debt, much
of it in the hands of China, and failing to
generate significant economic growth. It has
failed in its effort to transfer its focus from
the Middle East to Asia.
That’s not the way to protect America’s
Pacific interests. A pertinent object lesson
can be found in Spain back in 1898,
facing war with that upstart nation on the
American continent. Like many countries
on the wane, Spain remained oblivious
to its own internal decay. But it received
a jolt of reality when it learned that the
U.S. Congress, anticipating conflict, had
appropriated $50 million for national
defense, to be spent at the discretion of
President William McKinley. Spain had no
8 The National Interest
such capacity to draw on financial reserves;
any war it got into would have to be paid
for with borrowed funds.
Within a few months, Spain’s entire
Pacific fleet had been destroyed, and it
was kicked out of Asia (as well as the
Caribbean). Might it happen to America?
Not if the Obama administration and its
successors follow a carefully calibrated
policy in which America shows some
empathy to legitimate Chinese security
concerns, while also demonstrating that it
will not simply wink at bellicose actions.
Both countries have more to lose from
confrontation rather than cooperation.
Areas of cooperation should include
proposing clearer rules of the game. A
détente also needs to be encouraged
between China and its neighbors. Japan’s
nationalist grandstanding has unnecessarily
exacerbated tensions between Tokyo
and Beijing. America should support its
allies in South Korea, Japan and Taiwan,
but it should also discourage reckless
behavior that could drag Washington
into an unnecessary regional conflict. It
won’t be an easy course to navigate, but
skillful navigation can put Sino-American
relations onto a safer course without
sacrificing important U.S. interests. This
will require more than rhetoric about a
pivot to Asia; it will demand actual
pivoting. If America wants to preserve
the dreams of its heritage, it will have to
pursue an Asia-first strategy. n
The Realist
The GOP’s Identity Crisis
By Paul J. Saunders
I
n 1958, after the Republican Party suffered a stinging defeat in the midterm
elections that compounded the 1954
loss of its briefly held control of Congress,
Whittaker Chambers sent a letter to William
F. Buckley Jr. Buckley, who had founded
National Review three years earlier, was trying to create a conservative insurgency. Like
many other conservatives, including Ronald
Reagan, he revered Chambers for his searing
break with Communism and his exposure of
Alger Hiss as a Soviet agent, which he chronicled in his memoir Witness. Chambers had
warned the youthful Buckley against consorting with the radical Right, arguing that
politicians such as Senator Joseph McCarthy
discredited rather than bolstered a fledgling
conservative movement. Now Chambers diagnosed the woes of the gop:
If the Republican Party cannot get some grip of
the actual world we live in, and from it generalize and actively promote a program that means
something to masses of people—why, somebody else will. There will be nothing to argue.
The voters will simply vote Republicans into
singularity. The Republican Party will become
like one of those dark little shops which apparently never sell anything. If, for any reason,
you go in, you find, at the back, an old man,
fingering for his own pleasure some oddments
of cloth. Nobody wants to buy them, which is
Paul J. Saunders is executive director of the Center
for the National Interest and associate publisher of
The National Interest.
The GOP’s Identity Crisis
fine because the old man is not really interested
in selling. He just likes to hold and to feel.
If this sounds familiar, it should.
Then, as now, the gop faced an identity
crisis. Then, as now, ideologues attacked
pragmatists. In the late 1950s, the
trends seemed clear enough. Though the
Democrats went into the 1958 election
already controlling Congress, they won
a historically unprecedented fifteen seats
in the Senate (including two in a special
election upon Alaska’s statehood) as well as
forty-nine additional seats in the House of
Representatives. When the newly elected
Eighty-Sixth Congress started its first
session in 1959, the Democrats enjoyed
a thirty-seat majority in the Senate and
a 130-seat majority in the House.
Republicans also lost thirteen of twenty-one
gubernatorial elections.
At the time, analysts attributed the
outcome to several factors, including a
recession, intra-Republican divisions and
the Soviet Union’s successful Sputnik
satellite launch, which Democrats used to
attack President Dwight Eisenhower. But
the gop’s message also had clearly fallen
short. After the election, the political
scientist Frank Jonas, an expert on the
western states, pointed to the superficiality
of Republican candidates’ “glittering
generalities” and appeals to “faith and
freedom” when voters were more interested
in “their stomachs and their pocketbooks.”
Rather than “recognizing and meeting
March/April 2014 9
issues which arise from the needs and
desires of the people,” he wrote, “gimmicks
were invented and straw men set up.”
Since then, Chambers’s view has been
confirmed again and again. It occurred
most immediately and dramatically in Barry
Goldwater’s dismal showing in 1964. And
it was repeated in congressional elections
over the subsequent decades. As msnbc
commentator and former Republican
House member Joe Scarborough has
recently written in his book The Right Path:
In the early 1950s the Republicans began a
gradual but unmistakable shift from being a
political institution that was a pragmatic collection of various factions to being an ideological
institution that would, when at its very worst,
choose nominees in state and national elections
who could check every box required to advance
an ideological agenda except one: winning.
In fact, a dispirited Republican Party struggled to define an agenda throughout the
1960s and would not win control of the
Senate until 1980. Republicans would not
prevail in the House until the revolution of
1994. Though Republican Richard Nixon
was seen as the biggest loser of the 1958
election—an assessment strengthened by his
1960 defeat, which he discussed at length
in his book Six Crises—he absorbed the political lessons of these losses as well as Goldwater’s and won the presidency in 1968.
Nevertheless, neither Nixon’s election nor
his landslide reelection in 1972 would significantly shape the Democrat-dominated
Congress. The gop’s later success on Capitol
Hill took place only after a fresh generation
of conservatives had emerged, with a new
agenda and message.
O
nce again, Republicans are energetically debating the reasons underlying the gop’s recent electoral losses. In the
aftermath of what then president George
10 The National Interest
W. Bush memorably described as the party’s 2006 midterm “thumping” in the Senate and the House of Representatives, followed by President Barack Obama’s 2008
and 2012 presidential election victories,
the gop is engaged in a fresh bout of soul
searching. Yet even after seven years, not
to mention losing the popular vote in five
of the last six presidential elections, neither
leaders nor rank-and-file Republicans have
managed to agree on the causes or cures of
the party’s troubles, even as a new election
looms.
Obama may have handed the gop
a powerful campaign issue in 2014
with Obamacare’s many problems, but
party leaders should not allow optimism
about 2014 to short-circuit Republicans’
continuing reflection. Obamacare can
hardly form the basis of a political strategy
beyond this fall. Without corrective action,
the Republican Party may face yet another
defeat in 2016. Still, there is a clear path
that the gop can follow to regain its former
luster.
Finding the way ahead requires an honest
assessment of where the Republican Party
stands today. In fairness, much of the
speculation is overblown—voters’ rejection
of the war in Iraq, the 2008 financial
crisis and a few weak but high-profile
Republican candidates do not necessarily
add up to a struggling party. Further, there
is no shortage of commentators who have a
vested interest in generating a sense of crisis,
including ratings-driven media outlets,
liberal activists and pundits rallying their
own supporters, and political insurgents
seeking to overturn the gop’s established
hierarchy to win roles for themselves and
the candidates they support.
Still, it would be reckless to wave away
the divisions inside the party. They exist,
they are serious and they could bring it
down. The Tea Party faction has crystallized
widespread disenchantment with the
The GOP’s Identity Crisis
mainstream Republican Party—and fear
of the Democrats’ policy agenda—to raise
millions of dollars and mobilize millions
of voters. Though sympathy with the
Tea Party faction in the gop has fallen
sharply, some 38 percent of Republicans
continue to support it, according to a fall
2013 Gallup poll. The movement has also
had a demonstrable impact, moving taxes
and spending to the top of the national
political agenda and contributing to major
confrontations over Obama’s health-care
law, the budget and the debt ceiling in
the process. Perhaps most important to
Republican politicians and Republicanleaning donors, Tea Party activists have
demonstrated that they can defeat longterm incumbent gop legislators. To
paraphrase the eighteenth-century English
essayist Samuel Johnson, the prospect of
losing a primary election concentrates the
mind wonderfully. It has visibly shaped the
conduct of many Republicans on Capitol
Hill.
What the Tea Party movement really
represents is less clear, though some of
its self-appointed leaders profess great
ambitions. Speaking during the fall
2013 dispute over the debt ceiling, Matt
Kibbe, president of the Tea Party group
FreedomWorks, argued that the Republican
Party was experiencing “a disintermediation
in politics” in which “grassroots activists
have an ability to self-organize, to fund
candidates they’re more interested in, going
right around the Republican National
Committee.” Party leaders want to control
this but can’t, he continued, and if they
keep trying “there will absolutely be a
split” in which Kibbe and his allies “take
over the Republican Party” and the party
establishment and its supporters “go the
way of the Whigs.”
This is grandiose language. But while
the Tea Party may have emerged as a selforganized movement, it seems much less
The GOP’s Identity Crisis
so today. Now FreedomWorks and similar
groups are commonly led by professional
political operatives and funded by wealthy
donors as well as the ordinary individuals
who first defined the Tea Party, a
combination that allows them to employ
sophisticated and expensive methods to
expand their organizations and increase
influence. Whether one interprets this
change as a necessary step in the Tea Party’s
maturation or, conversely, as evidence
of its capture by a new segment within
America’s political establishment is a matter
of perspective. Michael Medved and John
Podhoretz, for example, suggest the latter
in Commentary, writing that “the incentive
to engineer and profit from conflict is even
greater for those who are not running for
office but who are making a name and an
increasingly good living”—“a new class
of political activists” that is “remarkably
entrepreneurial” and “aggressively seeks
marketing opportunities.”
March/April 2014 11
Standing athwart history yelling “stop” may sound
like a glorious cause, but history almost always wins.
On the other hand, could Tea Party
voters have had a similarly significant
and sustained role without this new class?
Probably not. The activist-operatives
provide a critical link between political
leaders and a national constituency without
which neither could be as effective. Senator
Ted Cruz and other politicians identified
with the Tea Party have had outsized impact
in no small part because they have appeared
to be riding a rising wave—and sympathetic
voters are empowered by organizations
that are far more well connected than most
grassroots groups could hope to be.
Of course, any new class must contend
with the current order—and establishment
figures, not to mention many Republicans
on both Wall Street and Main Street,
seem newly motivated to fight to
preserve the status quo. Notwithstanding
the hype surrounding the Tea Party, the
establishment has many advantages in
such a contest precisely because it is the
establishment and thus largely controls the
organizational levers of power within the
Republican Party, including the Republican
National Committee as well as state and
local party bodies and a lot of political
money. In Congress, establishment-oriented
leaders control the allocation of committee
posts—which Republican House leaders
have now reportedly linked to votes in
support of the party’s House leadership.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell
and House Speaker John Boehner have
also each publicly expressed frustration
with outside groups exhorting members
of Congress to vote against leadership
preferences.
12 The National Interest
gop officials can also influence the
selection of candidates and seem newly
motivated to do so. Charged with securing
a Republican majority in the Senate, Rob
Collins, executive director of the National
Republican Senatorial Committee, has
implicitly rebuked Tea Party groups. He
said, “The path to getting a general election
candidate who can win is the only thing we
care about”—a clear reference to the failed
and sometimes loopy Republican Senate
candidacies in the 2010 and 2012 election
cycles, including Nevada’s Sharron Angle,
Indiana’s Richard Mourdock and Missouri’s
Todd Akin. Other Republican officials have
expressed similar sentiments.
Influential outside groups are also
aligned with the establishment. One
pillar of Republican politics, the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce, recently helped
an establishment Republican defeat a
Tea Party candidate in a special election
for an Alabama seat in the House of
Representatives and, according to the Wall
Street Journal, has committed at least $50
million to support establishment candidates
in 2014 Republican primaries, particularly
the Senate, with the goal of “no fools on
our ticket.” State and local business leaders
are reportedly supporting establishment
candidates as well, including a Republican
challenger to incumbent Michigan Tea
Party star Representative Justin Amash.
By comparison, FreedomWorks reported
consolidated total revenue of just $20
million in its unaudited 2011 annual
report, the latest disclosed. The likeminded Senate Conservatives Fund, which
does not provide an annual report on its
The GOP’s Identity Crisis
website—audited or otherwise—and states
that it limits donations to $5,000, spent
$16 million in the 2012 election cycle,
according to federal records.
So is the gop nearing a truly historic
collapse brought about by this internecine
warfare? Probably not.
Until now, establishments in both major
political parties have prevailed far more
frequently than insurgent movements.
America’s winner-take-all elections
structurally privilege a two-party system
and marginalize niche groups that cannot
build a winning coalition—meaning that
emerging political forces can become
one of the two dominant parties only by
destroying an existing party or, alternatively,
by transforming one from within. The
Whigs disappeared over 150 years ago,
and no major party has disintegrated since.
Though the Republican establishment has
thus far failed to co-opt the Tea Party and
channel its energy—an intensely valuable
resource—it may yet succeed. If the Tea
Party simultaneously redefines the gop, it
might too.
However, if the two groups continue to
fight rather than merging, time favors the
Republican establishment. Eventually, Tea
Party groups will need not only rhetoric but
also practical accomplishments to maintain
the support of their donors and voters, and
they will need them even more so if they
hope to win sufficient power to determine
or heavily influence the Republican Party’s
agenda, strategy and tactics over time. In a
divided party within a divided government,
positive accomplishments will require the
kind of compromise that many Tea Party
figures have thus far rejected. The gop’s
fall 2013 surrender on the debt ceiling
after poor handling of an ill-chosen fight
and its early 2014 support for a budget
compromise illustrate just how difficult it
is to sustain a strategy of governance by
obstruction.
The GOP’s Identity Crisis
T
he bigger problem facing the Republican Party lies outside rather than inside, in defining an agenda to win elections
beyond red-state Senate seats and gerrymandered House districts. Intraparty divisions exacerbate this problem by forcing
candidates to make statements and adopt
positions that alienate potential supporters
(a regular problem in gop primaries) and
by muddling the party’s national message
(as with the varied formal responses to the
president’s last State of the Union address),
but disunity is not the main challenge. As
Whittaker Chambers wrote of the party
in 1958, the real threat to the gop is that
despite its widely supported principles, the
Republican Party has failed to define a constructive agenda that can win national support. As a result, according to a December
2013 Gallup poll, just 32 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the Republican Party—ten percentage points below the
share that see the Democrats positively.
Though the reasons for these attitudes are
widely discussed, and Republican pollsters
and political operatives have studied them
extensively, the Republican Party as a whole
has been unable to draw shared lessons or
come to agreed conclusions about how
to proceed. Until recently, Republicans
have devoted more time to debating how
conservative the party and its candidates
should be than to defining what it means
to be a conservative in America today and
proposing policies that apply conservative
principles to public concerns. Republicans
must change this if they want to be seen
as something other than the party of “no.”
Standing athwart history yelling “stop” may
sound like a glorious cause, but history
almost always wins.
Nothing illustrates Republicans’ failure to
“promote a program that means something
to masses of people,” as Chambers put it,
as clearly as the gop’s abysmal handling
of the Affordable Care Act, also known as
March/April 2014 13
Obamacare. Simply put, Republicans have
been fighting a losing battle to overturn
the law because they were not able to
make a meaningful health-care proposal
of their own of sufficient appeal either to
force compromise or to create a deadlock
on Capitol Hill by putting real public
pressure on moderate Democrats. In that
environment, the president’s imperfect
effort was for many Americans better than
no effort at all.
The gop’s inability to produce an
attractive alternative to Obamacare was
particularly unfortunate because the
law’s clear weaknesses provided a very
real opportunity for practical reforms.
Leaving aside conservatives’ philosophical
concerns, as a policy and political matter
the Affordable Care Act may well expand
access to health care in the future but has
been decidedly mixed in its impact on
costs, particularly for those who already had
insurance. This group makes up a much
greater share of the voting population than
the uninsured.
Finally, while the jury is still out on
the public’s eventual attitudes toward
Obama’s health-care plan—and many
Republicans clearly hope that its flawed
implementation will be a potent weapon in
the 2014 midterm elections—Obamacare’s
fundamentals appear likely to stick
regardless of the election outcomes in 2014
or even in 2016.
Consider whether a Republicancontrolled Congress could actually repeal
Obamacare in the real world as opposed
to the fantasy world of direct mail and
online fundraising appeals. If Republicans
win the Senate and keep the House
in 2014, or win control in both houses
while a Democrat follows Obama in the
White House in 2016, this would require
a veto-proof majority at both ends of the
Capitol Building—a remote prospect. But
even if Republicans achieve a national-
14 The National Interest
level political trifecta in 2016 by taking
the presidency and winning majorities
in both houses of Congress, gop leaders
may quickly find that repeal is much
more attractive as a campaign issue than
a legislative program. A newly elected
Republican president would be sorely
tempted to discourage repeal, as the divisive
effort could easily dominate and define a
first term much as the law’s passage did
for Obama. Blue-state Republicans, who
would mathematically have to make up
an important part of any gop-controlled
Congress, would probably be even less
enthusiastic. It seems likely that a new
Republican president and Congress would
have bigger priorities—starting with the
economy and jobs.
T
he Republican Party is ceding considerable territory to the Democrats
in other policy areas as well—some much
more promising than post-Obamacare
health care. While Republicans have been
more successful in blocking flawed legislation on energy and climate change (like a
cap-and-trade bill to set limits on greenhouse-gas emissions) and have continued to
press the Obama administration to approve
the Keystone XL pipeline, they have otherwise offered little on energy, a potent issue
that routinely leads surveys of the public’s
domestic and international policy priorities.
Like health care, energy touches Americans
deeply in daily life—as we heat or cool our
homes, drive to work or to shop, and plug
in more and more new electronic gadgets.
Because Republicans have offered little on
energy policy, Americans believe the Democrats do a better job on energy; a 2013 nbc
News/Wall Street Journal poll showed 36
percent preferring the Democrats and 26
percent the Republicans, with 18 percent
saying that they were “about the same” and
15 percent suggesting that neither would
do well. The 33 percent who today see no
The GOP’s Identity Crisis
The gop’s inability to produce an attractive alternative to
Obamacare was particularly unfortunate because the law’s clear
weaknesses provided a very real opportunity for practical reforms.
difference between the parties provide a
huge opportunity for Republican ideas and
policies, especially when combined with the
collapse of President Obama’s misguided
“green jobs” agenda.
The central lesson of America’s energy
sector over the last several years is that
government programs to subsidize existing
technologies like solar and wind have
not delivered on their promises even as
a private-sector revolution in oil and gas
production has created enormous new
economic activity and huge numbers of
jobs. The contrast powerfully demonstrates
both the critical role of technology in
generating growth and jobs and the validity
of conservative economic principles.
Republicans can and should find a way to
combine these two facts to develop a strong
energy program.
This will require more than quoting
Adam Smith or Ronald Reagan and then
standing back to see what happens—it
means writing policies to promote genuine
energy innovation, with respect to both
fossil fuels (which generate enormous
benefit and will be with us far longer
than some seem to think) and other
sources. Many Republicans are tempted
by the myth that hydraulic fracturing and
horizontal drilling, the key technologies
of the energy revolution, spontaneously
burst out from America’s energy companies
like the ancient Greek goddess Athena
springing from the forehead of Zeus.
As a result, some think, there is no need
for government-supported research.
This is wrong. In reality, both fracking
and horizontal drilling began as federally
The GOP’s Identity Crisis
funded research projects before being
combined and commercialized by energy
companies.
There is an impor tant role for
government here, though it must be
precisely defined. Needless to say, a
conservative energy agenda should not
increase the size of government—and it
need not, if Republicans can reallocate
resources away from subsidies to existing
technologies that can’t compete in the
marketplace in favor of research to
produce genuinely new ways to generate
and transmit energy. When necessary to
avoid disruption, the gop can apply creative
approaches like reverse auctions to phase
out tax credits or other subsidies over time,
asking those who seek U.S. government
support to compete in part on the basis of
how little federal funding they seek.
The Republican Party’s approach to
immigration reform is worse than a missed
opportunity; it is a significant political
liability. Many in the gop have taken the
first step toward recovery by admitting
that the party has a problem, but too often
the intra-Republican policy debate on
immigration conflates two separate issues—
U.S. policy toward illegal immigrants and
the Republican Party’s political appeal
to America’s expanding population of
Hispanic voters—and misunderstands the
relationship between them. The gop’s future
electoral prospects depend in no small part
on understanding each challenge separately
and redefining their connection.
The core misunderstanding is the idea
that supporting an immigration-reform
bill can fix the gop’s weak support among
March/April 2014 15
Hispanic voters. This is unlikely to prove
true for three reasons. First, it is not clear
how much credit the Republican Party
and individual gop legislators would
receive for supporting an immigration
bill, especially because they are unlikely
to outdo the Democrats in rhetoric.
Second, and more seriously, congressional
Republicans appear unlikely to be unified
on immigration reform—particularly in
the current environment inside the party—
and bitter debate is entirely possible. This
debate is bound to include precisely the
kind of nasty rhetoric that has alienated
many Hispanic voters in the past. Third,
immigration reform is not in fact the top
policy priority for Hispanic voters, who,
like other Americans, are more concerned
about issues that affect their daily lives.
This is regularly demonstrated in polls; for
example, a 2012 Gallup survey showed
that among Hispanic registered voters,
immigration ranked fifth in importance
after health care, unemployment, economic
growth, and the gap between rich and
poor—and only slightly above the federal
budget deficit.
This suggests that America’s immigrationreform debate may well be less important to
16 The National Interest
Hispanic voters for its policy consequences
than for the gop attitudes they believe it
reveals. Thus, a political strategy to attract
Hispanic voters should focus first and
foremost on avoiding hostile rhetoric and
on repudiating those who continue to use
it. This includes Republican politicians
who publicly decry Hispanic immigration,
which essentially tells Hispanic
Americans—twenty-three million eligible
voters, and possibly forty million by 2030,
accounting for 40 percent of the growth
in the electorate—that the gop doesn’t like
them and doesn’t consider them to be true
Americans. It’s hard to win votes that way.
After it stops some individuals from
repelling potential supporters, the
Republican Party should reach out by
concentrating on the same concrete, reallife issues that the party needs to address
anyway—and doing it in a way that
draws a stark contrast
between Republicans
and Democrats. The gop
can have a clear message:
while Democrats approach
Hispanic Americans and
other minority groups
on the basis of their
ethnicity and propose
collective solutions that
make few distinctions
among those in diverse
circumstances, Republicans
care about individuals
and are pursuing policies
to generate jobs and
expand opportunities for
real people rather than applying labels so
that they can easily check a political box.
Republicans themselves must recognize the
fundamental fact that appealing to group
interests rather than individual interests
means ceding the terms of debate to
Democrats. Conversely, if Republicans have
a policy that appeals to Americans—no
The GOP’s Identity Crisis
hyphenation needed—and avoid offending
potential voters in whatever social group,
they can do quite well.
From a political perspective, Republicans
on Capitol Hill may do best by deferring
legislative action on immigration; in the
current situation, pursuing a bipartisan
bill may actually damage the gop brand
rather than improving it. And waiting need
not have damaging political consequences
if Republicans take other needed steps
to appeal to Hispanic and other voters.
Meanwhile, congressional Republicans
should consider policies to offer an extra
helping hand to recent legal immigrants
who need it (whatever their origin) in
finding jobs and integrating themselves into
American society; this is important both
in ensuring that new immigrants do not
become long-term recipients of government
assistance and in assimilating them. It could
also help in demonstrating sympathy to
those who follow the rules when they enter
the country.
C o n t r ov e r s i a l s o c i a l i s s u e s , a n d
particularly gay marriage, seem likely to
remain a problem for the Republican
Party. Socially conservative positions
appear increasingly to be alienating many
younger voters, who see the gop as not
only the party of “no” but also the party of
“don’t”—a major factor in the appeal among
the young of libertarianism and libertarian
candidates inside or outside the Republican
Party. The libertarian desire for a
combination of less government with social
permissiveness is already draining support
away from Republicans in general elections.
This trend may become worse; Virginia’s
2013 gubernatorial election demonstrated
the cost starkly, when Democrat Terry
McAuliffe prevailed over the state’s socially
conservative Republican attorney general,
Ken Cuccinelli, by only 2.5 percent of the
vote even as Libertarian Party candidate
Robert Sarvis won 6.6 percent. Cuccinelli’s
The GOP’s Identity Crisis
positions on abortion and other social
issues clearly turned off some Republicans.
Like McAuliffe’s election, Colorado’s voterdriven legalization of recreational marijuana
was made possible by an alignment of
libertarians with Democrats against social
conservatism. Watch this space.
The answer to this, as many have
argued, is for Republican Party leaders to
de-emphasize social issues as campaign
issues—they are too polarizing and may
push libertarians and many independents
into the Democrats’ arms or into staying
home on Election Day. By 2011, twothirds of Americans under thirty-five
supported gay marriage, a share that has
grown significantly over the last decade and
continues to rise. Perhaps most significant,
policy on social issues tends to follow public
opinion rather than the reverse—suggesting
that social-conservative activists should work
harder to shape opinion and strengthen the
values they care about from the bottom up
rather than looking for rule-based answers
that may not last beyond the next election,
referendum or judicial appointment and
contradict the Republican Party’s overall
limited-government philosophy.
I
t will be very difficult to define a new
agenda for the Republican Party that can
simultaneously unify a divided party and
appeal to new voters in the wider electorate,
but some of the ideas above could be components in such an effort. Of course, this
agenda must include other key areas as well,
starting with a jobs plan that goes beyond
tax policy—an issue that despite its great
importance has fueled considerable cynicism. There may also be opportunities in
education policy, particularly in vocational
education; two-thirds of Americans between
twenty-five and twenty-nine do not have a
college degree and many are unemployed.
Finally, Republicans must build a foreign
policy that establishes a clear strategic
March/April 2014 17
framework, sets priorities and advances U.S.
national interests without relying excessively
on military force.
Republican political leaders must
redefine the party as a home for principled
but pragmatic problem solvers rather
than ideologues. In a left-leaning echo of
Whittaker Chambers, former Democratic
Leadership Council policy director Will
Marshall argued that in the 1980s, “voters
had heard what Democrats were selling.
They just weren’t buying.” The dlc’s new
ideas and practical approaches helped
propel Bill Clinton to the presidency and
set the stage for much of what followed.
No less important—as Clinton’s case
demonstrates—the Republican Party will
need a presidential candidate who can
personify and persuasively articulate its
message.
Moving forward, the gop does have many
important strengths. First, America remains
a center-right country in many respects.
This provides favorable terrain. Second,
some congressional Republican leaders—
including strong conservatives and even Tea
Party favorites—now see the need to respond
to what voters want. Speaking to Virginia
Republicans in the wake of his party’s
failure to secure any of the state’s top three
offices in November 2013, House Majority
Leader Eric Cantor said this clearly: “If we
want to win, we must offer solutions to
problems that people face every day. We have
not done this recently and it has allowed
Democrats to take power.” Likewise, Senator
Mike Lee, who deposed Utah’s Republican
establishment Senator Robert Bennett in
2010, recently argued that “there is a hole
within the Republican Party that is exactly
the size and shape of a conservative reform
agenda.” The recognition that it is not
enough for Republicans to fight higher taxes,
spending and borrowing when Americans
want solutions that help them in their daily
lives is a significant step.
18 The National Interest
Third, Republicans should take heart in
the fact that Democrats have their own
divisions and flaws. In a mirror image of
the gop, the Democratic Party is divided
between a liberal activist wing and a more
pragmatic establishment faction—and leftwing rhetoric and policy turn off many
American voters, whatever its advocates
may think. In addition, despite the obvious
benefits of controlling the executive branch,
President Obama is constantly torn between
satisfying and disappointing the party’s
most progressive elements. Since some of
the steps necessary to placate them may also
mobilize broad opposition, this is a lose-lose
choice.
Finally, the elections of 2014 and
2016 will inherently be referenda on the
president’s policies, at least in part, and
Obama’s record has been mixed. This may
be enough for Republicans to do well in the
midterm elections. It will probably not be
enough to win the White House in 2016.
In considering the longer term,
Republicans should also pause to compare
growing populist sentiments in the
Democratic Party to those in the gop and
to reflect on both the origins and possible
destinations of these trends. Although the
Occupy movement may have quickly lost
steam in the streets of Washington and New
York, left-wing populism in general has
been on the rise in parallel with the Tea
Party’s populist messages. In both cases, the
sentiments likely stem from a combination
of rage at politicians and frustration with
the country’s slow economic recovery after
the 2008 financial crisis.
The fact that some have abandoned
the Tea Party or its analogues on the left
because of their ineffective tactics should
not blur the reality that Americans are
angry and that statistics across the political
spectrum are disturbing. In a September
2013 Gallup survey, just 42 percent of
Americans had a great deal or a fair amount
The GOP’s Identity Crisis
Republican political leaders must redefine the party as a home for
principled but pragmatic problem solvers rather than ideologues.
of confidence in the federal government’s
ability to handle domestic problems; a
Pew Research Center poll earlier that year
found only 28 percent had favorable views
of the federal government. Congress enjoys
historically low, single-digit approval ratings
in several polls.
Even as Americans see the federal
government as less and less effective, they
also rate our economy and society as less
and less fair. A Rasmussen poll found that
just 32 percent of likely voters see the U.S.
economy as fair to the middle class, while
a Fox News poll found only 62 percent of
Americans professing to believe that with
hard work, it is possible to achieve the
American Dream—down from 72 percent
in 1997. A 2012 Pew Research Center
study showed that 77 percent of Americans,
including a majority of Republicans, say
that big corporations and a small number of
wealthy people have too much power. Here,
the Tea Party and the Occupy movement
appear to agree on the problem, though not
the solution.
A critical question is whether today’s
resurgent populism is a natural and
ultimately ephemeral reaction to events or
something more. While the former seems
more likely, anyone seeing statistics like
these for a foreign country in the news
would not be surprised to hear about
massive strikes, violent demonstrations
and widespread instability, or even
The GOP’s Identity Crisis
a crisis of legitimacy. Politicians of both
parties who don’t want to see the same in
America’s future should stop trashing their
own country every day in the media—
Democrats assailing its lack of fairness and
Republicans its government. After decades
of attacks on our government and society
by our own elected leaders and what many
see as growing dysfunction, who can be
surprised that the American people are
starting to believe what they hear? How
long can a situation like that endure?
Republicans, who often claim special pride
in our form of government, should have no
less commitment to maintaining it. Public
frustration can be an indispensable force
in improving policy and governance—or
a wrecking ball tearing through American
society.
From this perspective, defining a
positive agenda that builds on conservative
principles to address widespread public
concerns could help not only to improve
the Republican Party’s electoral prospects,
but also—with some policy successes—to
direct and defuse rising populist anger. The
gop’s little shop needs some new products,
better lighting and a welcome mat if party
leaders want to attract new customers. If
the proprietors instead argue loudly on the
sidewalk, pausing occasionally to insult
onlookers, they should not be surprised by
falling sales—or, eventually, a brick through
the window. n
March/April 2014 19
The Republican Battlefield
By Henry Olsen
T
he common wisdom holds that
the gop 2016 presidential race will
boil down to a joust between the
“establishment” and the “insurgents.” The
former will allegedly be more moderate
and the latter more conservative. Since
most polls for two decades have shown that
around two-thirds to 70 percent of self-described Republicans call themselves conservative, this elite narrative will focus on just
how much the establishment candidate will
need to be pulled to the right in order to
fend off his insurgent challenger. And since
the Tea Party has clearly become a vocal and
powerful insurgent element in the gop, the
narrative will focus on two other questions:
Who will gain Tea Party favor and emerge
as the insurgent candidate? And can the establishment candidate escape becoming Tea
Partyized during the primary season and
therefore remain a viable general-election
candidate?
The common wisdom has the advantage
of being a neat, coherent and exciting story.
It also allows political journalists to do what
they like to do most, which is to focus on
the personalities of the candidates and the
tactics they employ. It has only one small
problem. It is wrong.
Exit and entrance polls of Republican
primaries and caucuses going back to 1996
show that the Republican presidential
electorate is remarkably stable. It does
Henry Olsen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and
Public Policy Center.
20 The National Interest
not divide neatly along establishmentversus-conservative lines. Rather, the gop
contains four discrete factions that are based
primarily on ideology, with elements of
class and religious background tempering
that focus. Open nomination contests
during this period are resolved first by
how candidates become favorites of each
of these factions, and then by how they are
positioned to absorb the voting blocs of the
other factions as their favorites drop out.
This analysis allows us to explain what
we consistently observe. It explains why
a conservative party rarely nominates the
most conservative candidate. It explains
why the party often seems to nominate
the “next in line.” And, perhaps most
importantly, it explains why certain
candidates emerge as the “surprise”
candidate in each race.
Analysts and advisers who understand
this elemental map of the Republican
electorate will be better positioned to
navigate the shoals of the Republican
nominating river and bring one’s favored
candidate safely home to port.
R
epublican voters fall into four rough
camps. They are: moderate or liberal
voters; somewhat conservative voters; very
conservative, evangelical voters; and very
conservative, secular voters. Each of these
groups supports extremely different types
of candidates. Each of these groups has also
demonstrated stable preferences over the
past twenty years.
The Republican Battlefield
The most important of these groups is the
one most journalists don’t understand and
ignore: the somewhat conservative voters.
This group is the most numerous nationally
and in most states, comprising 35–40
percent of the national gop electorate. While
the numbers of moderates, very conservative
and evangelical voters vary significantly
by state, somewhat conservative voters are
found in similar proportions in every state.
They are not very vocal, but they form the
bedrock base of the Republican Party.
They also have a significant distinction:
they always back the winner. The candidate
who garners their favor has won each of the
last four open races. This tendency runs
down to the state level as well. Look at the
exit polls from virtually any state caucus
or primary since 1996 and you will find
that the winner received a plurality of or
ran roughly even among the somewhat
conservative voters.
These voters’ preferred candidate profile
can be inferred from the characteristics of
their favored candidates: Bob Dole in 1996,
George W. Bush in 2000, John McCain in
2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012. They like
even-keeled men with substantial governing
experience. They like people who express
conservative values on the economy or
social issues, but who do not espouse radical
change. They like people who are optimistic
about America; the somewhat conservative
voter rejects the “culture warrior” motif that
characterized Pat Buchanan’s campaigns.
They are conservative in both senses of the
word; they prefer the ideals of American
conservatism while displaying the cautious
disposition of the Burkean.
The moderate or liberal bloc is
surprisingly strong in presidential years,
comprising the second-largest voting bloc
with approximately 25–30 percent of all
gop voters nationwide. They are especially
strong in early voting states such as New
Hampshire (where they have comprised
The Republican Battlefield
between 45 and 49 percent of the gop
electorate between 1996 and 2012),
Florida and Michigan. They are, however,
surprisingly numerous even in the Deep
South, the most conservative portion of
the country. Moderates or liberals have
comprised between 31 and 39 percent of
the South Carolina electorate since 1996,
outnumbering or roughly equaling very
conservative voters in each of those years.
Moderate and liberal voters prefer
someone who is both more secular and less
fiscally conservative than their somewhat
conservative cousins. In 1996, for example,
they preferred Tennessee senator Lamar
Alexander over Bob Dole. In 2000, they
were the original McCainiacs, supporting
a candidate who backed campaign-finance
regulation, opposed tax cuts for the top
bracket and criticized the influence of
Pat Robertson. In 2008, they stuck with
McCain, giving him their crucial backing
in New Hampshire and providing his
margin of victory in virtually every state.
In 2012, they began firmly in Ron Paul’s or
Jon Huntsman’s camp. Paul and Huntsman
combined got 43 percent of their vote in
Iowa and 50 percent in New Hampshire.
Once it became clear that their candidates
could not win, however, the moderate or
liberal faction swung firmly toward Romney
in his fights with Newt Gingrich and Rick
Santorum.
This latter movement is perhaps most
indicative of their true preferences. The
moderate or liberal voter seems motivated
by a candidate’s secularism above all else.
They will always vote for the Republican
candidate who seems least overtly religious
and are motivated to oppose the candidate
who is most overtly religious. This makes
them a secure bank of votes for a somewhat
conservative candidate who emerges from
the early stages of the primary season in
a battle with a religious conservative, as
occurred in 1996, 2008 and 2012.
March/April 2014 21
The common wisdom holds that the gop 2016 presidential race
will boil down to a joust between the “establishment” and the
“insurgents.” This story has only one small problem. It is wrong.
The third-largest group is the moderates’
b ê t e n o i re : t h e ve r y c o n s e r va t i ve
evangelicals. This group is small compared
to the others, comprising around one-fifth
of all gop voters. They gain significant
strength, however, from three unique
factors. First, they are geographically
concentrated in Southern and border states,
where they can comprise a quarter or more
of a state’s electorate. Moreover, somewhat
conservative voters in Southern and border
states are also likelier to be evangelical,
and they tend to vote for more socially
conservative candidates than do their
non-Southern, nonevangelical ideological
cousins. Finally, they are very motivated to
turn out in caucus states, such as Iowa and
Kansas, and form the single largest bloc of
voters in those races.
These factors have given very
conservative, evangelical-backed candidates
unusual strength in Republican presidential
contests. The evangelical favorite, for
example, surprised pundits by winning
Iowa in 2008 and 2012, and supplied the
backing for second-place Iowa finishers Pat
Robertson in 1988 and Pat Buchanan in
1996. Their strength in the Deep South
and the border states also allowed Mike
Huckabee rather than Mitt Romney to
emerge as John McCain’s final challenger
in 2008, and that strength combined with
their domination of the February 7 caucuses
in Minnesota and Colorado allowed Rick
Santorum to emerge as Romney’s challenger
in 2012.
This group prefers candidates who are
very open about their religious beliefs,
place a high priority on social issues
22 The National Interest
such as gay marriage and abortion, and
see the United States in decline because
of its movement away from the faith and
moral codes of its past. Their favored
candidates tend to be economically
more open to government intervention.
Santorum, for example, wanted to favor
manufacturing over services, and Buchanan
opposed nafta. This social conservatism
and economic moderation tends to place
these candidates out of line with the center
of the Republican Party, the somewhat
conservative voter outside the Deep South.
Each evangelical-backed candidate has lost
this group decisively in primaries in the
Midwest, Northeast, Pacific Coast and
mountain states. Indeed, they even lose
them in Southern-tinged states like Virginia
and Texas, where McCain’s ability to win
the somewhat conservative voters, coupled
with huge margins among moderates and
liberals, allowed him to hold off Huckabee
in one-on-one face-offs.
The final and smallest gop tribe is the
one that dc elites are most familiar with:
the very conservative, secular voters. This
group comprises a tiny 5–10 percent
nationwide and thus never sees its choice
emerge from the initial races to contend in
later stages. Jack Kemp and Pete DuPont
in 1988; Steve Forbes or Phil Gramm in
1996 and 2000; Fred Thompson or Mitt
Romney in 2008; Herman Cain, Rick
Perry or Newt Gingrich in 2012: each of
these candidates showed promise in early
polling but foundered in early races once
voters became more familiar with each
of the candidates. Secular moderates and
somewhat conservative voters preferred
The Republican Battlefield
candidates with less materialistic,
sweeping economic radicalism while
very conservative evangelicals went with
someone singing from their hymnal. Thus,
these voters quickly had to choose which
of the remaining candidates to support in
subsequent races.
This small but influential bloc likes
urbane, fiscally oriented men. Thus, they
preferred Kemp or DuPont in 1988, Forbes
or Gramm in 1996, Forbes in 2000 and
Romney in 2008. In 2012, this group was
tempted by Rick Perry until his lack of
sophistication became painfully obvious
in the early debates. It then flirted with
Newt Gingrich until his temperamental
issues resurfaced in Florida. After that,
faced with the choice of Rick Santorum or
Mitt Romney, it swung behind Romney en
masse.
The latter example is in fact this group’s
modus operandi. They invariably see their
preferred candidate knocked out early, and
they then invariably back whoever is backed
by the somewhat conservative bloc. Forbes’s
early exit from the 2000 race, for example,
was crucial to George W. Bush’s ability to
win South Carolina against the McCain
onslaught. In New Hampshire, Bush won
only 33 percent of the very conservative
vote; Forbes received 20 percent. With
Forbes out of the race, however, Bush
was able to capture 74 percent of the very
conservative vote in South Carolina.
The fact that these factions have
remained very similar in preferences and
in strength over the past twenty years
provides a clear guide to anyone who wants
to understand how the 2016 Republican
nomination contest will unfold.
T
he first thing a prospective analyst
needs to understand is the crucial role
that the year preceding the actual contests
plays. In this “preseason,” candidates compete to become favored by one of the four
The Republican Battlefield
factions. Sometimes no one is competing
with a candidate for that favor, which frequently happens on the moderate or liberal
side. Other times, though, there is intense
competition and the preseason maneuvering determines if someone survives until
the actual early contests. We can see this in
the maneuvering between Steve Forbes and
Phil Gramm in 1996, George W. Bush and
Elizabeth Dole in 2000, a number of people
in 2008, and between Mitt Romney and
Tim Pawlenty in 2012.
The Gramm-Forbes battle centered
on who would lead the secular, very
conservative forces. Gramm focused
on shrinking government, Forbes on tax
cuts. Despite Gramm’s strong national
presence and Forbes’s complete lack of
one, it became clear by December 1995
that the issue of cutting taxes stirred this
group’s voters much more than shrinking
government. Forbes, not Gramm, therefore
became the secular, very conservative hope
and presented a serious challenge to other
candidates before becoming the focus of
attacks in January.
The 2000 Bush-Dole battle (with
sideline competition from Lamar
Alexander and Dan Quayle) was for
who would be favored by somewhat
conservative voters. Bush could not
compete with Forbes on taxes, although
his own tax-cut plan crucially cut into
Forbes’s advantage. Nor could he dominate
evangelical conservatives in the early races,
being challenged by the more overtly
religious and fiery Alan Keyes and Gary
Bauer. So his chance to win rested on
his ability to win enough votes among
both groups of very conservative voters
to supplement a strong advantage among
somewhat conservatives. Dole was his only
serious competition here, and to that end
Bush poured resources into the Ames straw
poll in an effort to drive her from the race
by showing donors she could not win.
March/April 2014 23
He succeeded, defeating her by a large
margin. She dropped out shortly thereafter
with her bank account nearly dry, giving
Bush the leadership role for the largest gop
faction.
2008 saw three separate subprimaries:
Kansas senator Sam Brownback versus
Mike Huckabee for the very conservative,
evangelical vote, McCain versus Rudy
Giuliani for the moderate or liberal vote,
and Romney versus Thompson for the very
conservative, secular vote. In each case the
off-year preseason gave one man a clear
early advantage. Thompson’s lackadaisical
effort caused him to lose ground to the
less ideological but more focused Romney;
Brownback dropped out in the summer,
being unable to excite the evangelical
grassroots like Huckabee; and Giuliani
failed to capitalize on an early lead, giving
McCain time to reestablish his support.
The early races simply confirmed what polls
in December 2007 were already showing
among each faction.
The 2012 Pawlenty-Romney primary
was short, with Pawlenty trying to
show somewhat conservative voters and
donors that he was more electable than
Romney. His effort fizzled, with large
donors unconvinced and his poor debate
performances showing voters Pawlenty
24 The National Interest
lacked the instinct to win. His poor Ames
showing also doomed his effort, causing
a nearly broke candidate to drop out
within a week. With every other candidate
competing for the two very conservative
groups, and with Paul and Huntsman
competing for moderates, Romney sailed
into the early contests.
The 2016 field is still developing, but
it’s already possible to discern which
candidates are focusing on which factions.
Ohio governor John Kasich is staking out
ground in the moderate-to-liberal wing
with his focus on expanding Medicaid and
rhetorically supporting active government.
New Jersey governor Chris Christie is trying
to make himself the mainstream, somewhat
conservative favorite by eschewing fiery
rhetoric, emphasizing commonsense
governing and attacking Washington. If
they run, this will also be Representative
Paul Ryan’s and former Florida governor
Jeb Bush’s faction. If neither of those
two run and Christie falters, Wisconsin
governor Scott Walker stands to benefit,
as Walker is displaying a similar approach
to his competitors. Rick Santorum and
Mike Huckabee could face off for the very
conservative, evangelical nod. Santorum’s
2012 support in primaries and caucuses
came in the same areas and from the
The Republican Battlefield
same people who backed Huckabee in
2008. There would not be room for both
candidates in 2016, so the preseason
jockeying between these two could be
intense.
Virtually everyone else in the race is
competing for the favor of the smallest,
least influential group: the secular
conservatives. All focus on some sort of
fiscal issue as their primary focus, and most
also try to adopt an anti-Washington tone.
Some have secondary messages designed to
appeal to other factions, much as George
W. Bush did in 2000. Senator Rand Paul’s
focus on civil liberties and limiting overseas
military actions would hold some appeal
for gop moderates and liberals, as would
Senator Marco Rubio’s occasional forays
into antipoverty efforts. Rubio’s backing
of immigration reform is of interest to
somewhat conservative donors, and his
authoring of federal antiabortion legislation
creates some support among the socially
conservative wing. But Paul’s, Rubio’s and
Texas senator Ted Cruz’s hope must be that
the secular, very conservative wing is in fact
much larger in 2016 than it has been in the
past.
Tea Party–backed victories in senatorial
and congressional primaries give them some
reason for hope. In race after race in 2010
and 2012, a populist conservative focusing
on fiscal issues upset a more establishment
candidate from the somewhat conservative
or moderate-to-liberal wings. Many
observers say this has pushed the national
party to the right, something that also
should help a Tea Party fiscal conservative.
A careful analysis of the data and of these
races, however, shows that these hopes are
likely unfounded.
T
he national data suggest that any Republican move to the right after the
election of Barack Obama was muted. We
have exit polls from Republican primaries
The Republican Battlefield
or caucuses in eighteen states from both
2008 and 2012. The share of gop voters
identifying themselves as very conservative
did rise between those years, but only by
about three and a half percentage points.
It shrunk or rose less than two points in
Virginia, Alabama, South Carolina, New
Hampshire and Massachusetts. Moreover,
some of that gain seems to have come from
those who were previously somewhat conservative becoming slightly more intense
about their conservatism. The overall share
of the electorate calling themselves any
brand of conservative rose only two and a
half percentage points. The total number of
conservatives shrunk or stayed even in Iowa,
South Carolina, Alabama, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Virginia, Nevada and Tennessee.
2012 candidates who banked on a change
of the gop electoral map were thus cruelly
disappointed.
Nor do the Tea Party Senate primary
victories appear to presage a sea change
in gop attitudes. They generally have two
characteristics unlikely to pertain in the
2016 presidential race. First, they occurred
primarily in smaller states in the South and
West. While these states hold the balance
in the Senate, they do not elect most of
the delegates needed to win a presidential
nomination. Larger states, especially
California and those in the Midwest and
Northeast, still have substantial power
to influence the nomination contest. As
importantly, these victories tended to occur
in one-on-one races or races with only two
serious candidates. Tea Party candidates
fared much worse in multicandidate races.
In presidential contests, multicandidate
races are the norm until well into March,
suggesting a Tea Party candidate will find it
difficult to win in the early stages.
Most observers accept that Florida
(Rubio), Utah (Mike Lee), Nevada (Sharron
Angle), Colorado (Ken Buck), Alaska (Joe
Miller), Delaware (Christine O’Donnell),
March/April 2014 25
Texas (Cruz), Kentucky (Paul) and Indiana
(Richard Mourdock) represent clear cases
of a Tea Party candidate defeating a more
conventional, “establishment” Republican.
Of these, only the Texas and Florida
victories occurred in states that will matter
except in a protracted 2016 fight, and it’s
worth noting that Rubio prevailed without
a contested primary vote as his opponent,
then governor Charlie Crist, dropped
out before the primary. O’Donnell’s win
came against the most liberal Republican
in Congress, someone far to the left of
anyone who is expected to run in 2016.
Buck’s and Miller’s wins were in one-onone races and very narrow; Lee’s was in a
convention, not a primary; and Mourdock’s
came against a thirty-six-year senatorial
veteran with residency issues. None came in
circumstances likely to resemble those in a
seriously contested presidential contest with
the sort of field that is so far assembling.
Ted Cruz’s victory appears impressive, but
it too is less so upon further examination.
Cruz won only because Texas requires a
candidate to receive 50 percent in a
multicandidate primary to avoid a runoff.
Cruz finished second in that first race with
a mere 34.2 percent. He won handily (by a
13 percent margin) in a one-on-one runoff
in which nearly three hundred thousand
fewer votes were cast than in the first race, a
setup that nearly all observers said benefited
the most conservative candidate.
Note that successful Tea Party challenges
have yet to occur in statewide races in large
states that do not reliably vote Republican.
The purple and blue states touching the
Great Lakes will select a combined 398
delegates to the 2016 Republican
convention, all by primaries. California
will select another 172 delegates through
its primary, and the New England states
of Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island
and Connecticut will select another 104.
States whose Republican electorates, then,
26 The National Interest
are heretofore indisposed to elect Tea
Partiers will retain a substantial voice in the
Republican race.
Careful observers will note that I
excluded Representative Todd Akin’s win
in the 2012 Missouri Senate primary from
the above list. That’s because it was a race
with three serious candidates, and as such
is more indicative of the circumstances
any fiscally focused Tea Partier will face
in 2016. Akin drew his support from
social conservatives; Lieutenant Governor
John Brunner was the conventional,
“establishment” candidate; and Sarah
Steelman, the state treasurer, ran as a
populist fiscal conservative. Akin came out
on top with 36 percent to Brunner’s 30
percent and Steelman’s 29 percent. This is
quite similar to the state’s 2008 Republican
presidential primary, which was also a threeway race between social conservative Mike
Huckabee, conventional Republican Mitt
Romney and John McCain. Comparing
these two races yields a cautionary tale for
any Tea Party candidate.
A county-by-county analysis shows
that Akin’s vote tracked Huckabee’s quite
closely in most areas of the state. Where
Huckabee did well so too did Akin, and
vice versa. Steelman’s support also tracked
Huckabee’s, although not as well: the rural
evangelical vote was split between the two
outsiders. Akin’s margin, though, came
from suburban St. Louis, where he won
handily while Huckabee lost big. This
is easily explained by the fact that Akin
represented a suburban St. Louis district
for many years. In 2008, these counties
provided John McCain’s victory margin,
supporting the most moderate of the
three serious contenders. While Akin’s
constituents knew him and supported him,
a nonlocal, populist conservative is unlikely
to do well enough here to avoid relying, as
Akin did, on evangelical votes elsewhere in
the state.
The Republican Battlefield
The likely outcome will be a repeat of the traditional gop three-way
war between its somewhat conservative center and the two ideological
wings: the moderate secularists and conservative evangelicals.
Missouri shows that an identifiable social
conservative will eat into the support for a
more fiscally oriented Tea Party populist.
Ted Cruz did not face a serious candidate to
his social right in his Texas multicandidate
race; the only other serious candidate,
Dallas mayor Ted Leppert, campaigned as
a more moderate, establishment candidate.
If Tea Party populism overlaps substantially
with social conservatism for its voter
support, and if social conservatives will
prefer one of their own when given that
choice, then Tea Party presidential hopefuls’
chances rest upon the social conservative
getting knocked out of the early races.
Unfortunately for them, the early races
tend to favor the candidates coming from
the moderate-to-liberal or the evangelical
factions of the party.
I
owa is the first state to vote, and its preference for evangelical candidates is clear.
Not only did Huckabee and Santorum win
their races but, going as far back as Pat
Robertson’s surprise second-place finish in
1988, culturally conservative candidates
have always done very well. The state has
traditionally “winnowed” the field to at
most three candidates and usually two, a
social conservative and a somewhat conservative. Iowa, therefore, is a crucial first test
for a fiscally conservative Tea Partier.
New Hampshire, the next state to vote,
is not an easier challenge. New Hampshire’s
primary is open to registered independents
and is one of the most moderate or liberal
gop electorates in the country. It also has
one of the lowest shares of evangelicals
of any Republican electorate. A socially
The Republican Battlefield
conservative Iowa winner will not do
well there unless he is Catholic (New
Hampshire’s gop electorate is plurality
Catholic) and the non-social-conservative
field is split between at least three serious
candidates (which allowed Catholic social
conservative Pat Buchanan to eke out a
narrow win in 1996). The challenge for the
somewhat conservative favorite will likely
be to forestall a challenge from his left, as
Romney did successfully in 2012 but which
he and Bush failed to do against McCain in
2000 and 2008.
South Carolina and Nevada then round
out the first four states to vote. Newt
Gingrich’s breakthrough victory in South
Carolina in 2012 gives hope to a Tea Party
conservative, but it is worth noting that
the Palmetto State is an evangelical state
that also has large numbers of moderates
and somewhat conservatives. Nevada’s
caucuses are perhaps the most fertile
ground for a Tea Party fiscal conservative
to win early. In both 2008 and 2012, the
electorate was wealthy (28 percent or more
make $100,000 or more), secular (only
about a quarter are evangelical) and very
conservative (between 40 and 49 percent).
The one caveat is the strong Mormon
presence (25 percent), but it is not clear
that Mormons will turn out in such large
numbers without a coreligionist among the
top flight of candidates.
The next states to vote have not yet been
determined, but it’s worth noting two
patterns that have held for three cycles.
First, Arizona, Michigan and Florida tend
to vote early. Arizona is another secular,
conservative state with a strong Mormon
March/April 2014 27
minority: Steve Forbes won here in 1996.
Michigan has a strong social-conservative
element among Catholics and Dutch
Calvinists in the western part of the state,
but it is also one of the more moderate states
in the gop electorate. Florida also tends to
the moderate side (39 percent in 2008 and
31 percent in 2012) and is the home to
the only significant Hispanic Republican
community in the early states, Miami’s
Cubans. These voters broke sharply for John
McCain in 2008, giving him his margin
of victory over Mitt Romney. It is also
unfavorable to evangelical candidates, who
tend to do well only in the rural counties
in the northern part of the state. Marco
Rubio or Jeb Bush would clearly be viewed
as home-state favorites should either run.
Second, Southern states dominated by
socially conservative evangelical voters
also tend to cast their ballots shortly after
the first four states and Florida. In 2008,
six Southern states voted on February 5.
Mike Huckabee won or came in a close
second in all of them, establishing him
rather than Mitt Romney as John McCain’s
final challenger. In 2012, when fewer states
overall voted early, four Southern states
voted on March 6, followed quickly by the
Kansas caucuses, which were dominated by
religious conservatives, and by two more
28 The National Interest
Southern primaries on March
13. Rick Santorum won six of
these seven states, dropping
only Virginia, where he was
not on the ballot. If this
pattern continues in 2016,
the Tea Party favorite is again
likely to stumble if faced by a
strong religious conservative.
In s u m , a Te a Pa r t y
candidate either needs to
clearly deny any breathing
space to a more evangelical
candidate or he must emulate
George W. Bush in 2000 in
having enough appeal to other factions to
gain enough strength to survive the early
states. The likelier outcome will be a repeat
of the traditional gop three-way war between
its somewhat conservative center and the
two large ideological wings: the moderate
secularists and conservative evangelicals.
P
ast need not be prologue, however. In
the movie Lawrence of Arabia, Peter
O’Toole’s Lawrence decides to go back into
a hellish desert to rescue a straggler. His
close aide, Sherif Ali, tells him not to bother, that the straggler’s fate is foreordained.
“It is written,” Ali tells the Englishman.
“Nothing is written,” Lawrence angrily yells
back. He then goes into the desert and returns with his man.
Lawrence could conquer the desert and
its heat through his will, but he could
not will the desert away. gop aspirants
would do well to emulate Lawrence’s
will and resourcefulness, but they too
cannot will away their surroundings.
Whichever candidate from whichever
faction emerges, he or she will have done
so by understanding the four species of
gop voters and using their wiles and the
calendar to their advantage. For truly, as Ali
said of Lawrence, for some men nothing is
written until they write it. n
The Republican Battlefield
Taiwan’s Dire Straits
By John J. Mearsheimer
W
hat are the implications for
Taiwan of China’s continued
rise? Not today. Not next year.
No, the real dilemma Taiwan will confront
looms in the decades ahead, when China,
whose continued economic growth seems
likely although not a sure thing, is far more
powerful than it is today.
Contemporary China does not possess
significant military power; its military forces
are inferior, and not by a small margin, to
those of the United States. Beijing would be
making a huge mistake to pick a fight with
the American military nowadays. China, in
other words, is constrained by the present
global balance of power, which is clearly
stacked in America’s favor.
But power is rarely static. The real
question that is often overlooked is what
happens in a future world in which the
balance of power has shifted sharply
against Taiwan and the United States, in
which China controls much more relative
power than it does today, and in which
China is in roughly the same economic
and military league as the United States. In
John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison
Distinguished Service Professor of Political
Science at the University of Chicago. He serves
on the Advisory Council of The National Interest.
This article is adapted from a speech he gave in
Taipei on December 7, 2013, to the Taiwanese
Association of International Relations. An updated
edition of his book The Tragedy of Great Power
Politics will be published in April by W. W. Norton.
Taiwan’s Dire Straits
essence: a world in which China is much
less constrained than it is today. That world
may seem forbidding, even ominous, but it
is one that may be coming.
It is my firm conviction that the
continuing rise of China will have huge
consequences for Taiwan, almost all of which
will be bad. Not only will China be much
more powerful than it is today, but it will
also remain deeply committed to making
Taiwan part of China. Moreover, China will
try to dominate Asia the way the United
States dominates the Western Hemisphere,
which means it will seek to reduce, if not
eliminate, the American military presence in
Asia. The United States, of course, will resist
mightily, and go to great lengths to contain
China’s growing power. The ensuing security
competition will not be good for Taiwan, no
matter how it turns out in the end. Time is
not on Taiwan’s side. Herewith, a guide to
what is likely to ensue between the United
States, China and Taiwan.
I
n an ideal world, most Taiwanese would
like their country to gain de jure independence and become a legitimate sovereign state in the international system. This
outcome is especially attractive because a
strong Taiwanese identity—separate from a
Chinese identity—has blossomed in Taiwan
over the past sixty-five years. Many of those
people who identify themselves as Taiwanese would like their own nation-state, and
they have little interest in being a province
of mainland China.
March/April 2014 29
According to National Chengchi
University’s Election Study Center, in
1992, 17.6 percent of the people living
in Taiwan identified as Taiwanese only.
By June 2013, that number was 57.5
percent, a clear majority. Only 3.6 percent
of those surveyed identified as Chinese
only. Furthermore, the 2011 Taiwan
National Security Survey found that if one
assumes China would not attack Taiwan
if it declared its independence, 80.2
percent of Taiwanese would in fact opt for
independence. Another recent poll found
that about 80 percent of Taiwanese view
Taiwan and China as different countries.
However, Taiwan is not going to gain
formal independence in the foreseeable
future, mainly because China would not
tolerate that outcome. In fact, China
has made it clear that it would go to war
against Taiwan if the island declares its
independence. The antisecession law, which
China passed in 2005, says explicitly that
“the state shall employ nonpeaceful means
and other necessary measures” if Taiwan
moves toward de jure independence. It is
also worth noting that the United States
does not recognize Taiwan as a sovereign
country, and according to President
Obama, Washington “fully supports a oneChina policy.”
Thus, the best situation Taiwan can hope
for in the foreseeable future is maintenance
of the status quo, which means de facto
independence. In fact, over 90 percent of
the Taiwanese surveyed this past June by the
Election Study Center favored maintaining
the status quo indefinitely or until some
later date.
The worst possible outcome is unification
with China under terms dictated by Beijing.
Of course, unification could happen in a
variety of ways, some of which are better
than others. Probably the least bad outcome
would be one in which Taiwan ended up
with considerable autonomy, much like
30 The National Interest
Hong Kong enjoys today. Chinese leaders
refer to this solution as “one country, two
systems.” Still, it has little appeal to most
Taiwanese. As Yuan-kang Wang reports:
“An overwhelming majority of Taiwan’s
public opposes unification, even under
favorable circumstances. If anything,
longitudinal data reveal a decline in public
support of unification.”
In s h o r t , f o r Ta i w a n , d e f a c t o
independence is much preferable to
becoming part of China, regardless of what
the final political arrangements look like.
The critical question for Taiwan, however,
is whether it can avoid unification and
maintain de facto independence in the face
of a rising China.
W
hat about China? How does it think
about Taiwan? Two different logics,
one revolving around nationalism and the
other around security, shape its views concerning Taiwan. Both logics, however, lead
to the same endgame: the unification of
China and Taiwan.
The nationalism story is straightforward
and uncontroversial. China is deeply
committed to making Taiwan part of
China. For China’s elites, as well as its
public, Taiwan can never become a
sovereign state. It is sacred territory that
has been part of China since ancient times,
but was taken away by the hated Japanese
in 1895—when China was weak and
vulnerable. It must once again become an
integral part of China. As Hu Jintao said
in 2007 at the Seventeenth Party Congress:
“The two sides of the Straits are bound
to be reunified in the course of the great
rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”
The unification of China and Taiwan is
one of the core elements of Chinese national
identity. There is simply no compromising
on this issue. Indeed, the legitimacy of the
Chinese regime is bound up with making
sure Taiwan does not become a sovereign
Taiwan’s Dire Straits
The continuing rise of China will have huge consequences
for Taiwan, almost all of which will be bad.
state and that it eventually becomes an
integral part of China.
Chinese leaders insist that Taiwan must
be brought back into the fold sooner rather
than later and that hopefully it can be done
peacefully. At the same time, they have
made it clear that force is an option if they
have no other recourse.
The security story is a different one, and
it is inextricably bound up with the rise
of China. Specifically, it revolves around
a straightforward but profound question:
How is China likely to behave in Asia over
time, as it grows increasingly powerful? The
answer to this question obviously has huge
consequences for Taiwan.
The only way to predict how a rising
China is likely to behave toward its
neighbors as well as the United States is
with a theory of great-power politics. The
main reason for relying on theory is that
we have no facts about the future, because
it has not happened yet. Thomas Hobbes
put the point well: “The present only has a
being in nature; things past have a being in
the memory only; but things to come have
no being at all.” Thus, we have no choice
but to rely on theories to determine what is
likely to transpire in world politics.
My own realist theory of international
relations says that the structure of the
international system forces countries
concerned about their security to compete
with each other for power. The ultimate
goal of every major state is to maximize
its share of world power and eventually
dominate the system. In practical terms,
this means that the most powerful states
seek to establish hegemony in their region
Taiwan’s Dire Straits
of the world, while making sure that no
rival great power dominates another region.
To be more specific, the international
system has three defining characteristics.
First, the main actors are states that operate
in anarchy, which simply means that there
is no higher authority above them. Second,
all great powers have some offensive
military capability, which means they
have the wherewithal to hurt each other.
Third, no state can know the intentions of
other states with certainty, especially their
future intentions. It is simply impossible,
for example, to know what Germany’s
or Japan’s intentions will be toward their
neighbors in 2025.
In a world where other states might have
malign intentions as well as significant
offensive capabilities, states tend to fear
each other. That fear is compounded by the
fact that in an anarchic system there is no
night watchman for states to call if trouble
comes knocking at their door. Therefore,
states recognize that the best way to survive
in such a system is to be as powerful as
possible relative to potential rivals. The
mightier a state is, the less likely it is that
another state will attack it. No Americans,
for example, worry that Canada or Mexico
will attack the United States, because
neither of those countries is strong enough
to contemplate a fight with Uncle Sam.
But great powers do not merely strive to
be the strongest great power, although that
is a welcome outcome. Their ultimate aim
is to be the hegemon—which means being
the only great power in the system.
What exactly does it mean to be a
hegemon in the modern world? It is almost
March/April 2014 31
impossible for any state to achieve global
hegemony, because it is too hard to sustain
power around the globe and project it onto
the territory of distant great powers. The
best outcome a state can hope for is to be a
regional hegemon, to dominate one’s own
geographical area. The United States has
dominate Asia the way the United States
dominates the Western Hemisphere. It
will try to become a regional hegemon. In
particular, China will seek to maximize the
power gap between itself and its neighbors,
especially India, Japan and Russia. China
will want to make sure it is so powerful
been a regional hegemon in the Western
Hemisphere since about 1900. Although
the United States is clearly the most
powerful state on the planet today, it is not
a global hegemon.
States that gain regional hegemony have
a further aim: they seek to prevent great
powers in other regions from duplicating
their feat. Regional hegemons, in other
words, do not want peer competitors.
Instead, they want to keep other regions
divided among several great powers, so
that those states will compete with each
other and be unable to focus their attention
and resources on them. In sum, the ideal
situation for any great power is to be the
only regional hegemon in the world. The
United States enjoys that exalted position
today.
What does this theory say about how
China is likely to behave as it rises in the
years ahead? Put simply, China will try to
that no state in Asia has the wherewithal to
threaten it.
It is unlikely that China will pursue
military superiority so it can go on
a rampage and conquer other Asian
countries, although that is always possible.
Instead, it is more likely that it will want
to dictate the boundaries of acceptable
behavior to neighboring countries, much
the way the United States lets other states in
the Americas know that it is the boss.
An increasingly powerful China is also
likely to attempt to push the United States
out of Asia, much the way the United States
pushed the European great powers out of
the Western Hemisphere in the nineteenth
century. We should expect China to come
up with its own version of the Monroe
Doctrine, as Japan did in the 1930s.
These policy goals make good strategic
sense for China. Beijing should want
a militarily weak Japan and Russia as its
32 The National Interest
Taiwan’s Dire Straits
neighbors, just as the United States prefers
a militarily weak Canada and Mexico on its
borders. What state in its right mind would
want other powerful states located in its
region? All Chinese surely remember what
happened in the previous two centuries
when Japan was powerful and China was
weak.
Furthermore, why would a powerful
China accept U.S. military forces operating
in its backyard? American policy makers,
after all, go ballistic when other great
powers send military forces into the
Western Hemisphere. Those foreign forces
are invariably seen as a potential threat to
American security. The same logic should
apply to China. Why would China feel safe
with U.S. forces deployed on its doorstep?
Following the logic of the Monroe
Doctrine, would China’s security not be
better served by pushing the American
military out of Asia?
Why should we expect China to act any
differently than the United States did?
Are Chinese leaders more principled than
American leaders? More ethical? Are they
less nationalistic? Less concerned about
their survival? They are none of these
things, of course, which is why China is
likely to imitate the United States and try to
become a regional hegemon.
W
hat are the implications of this security story for Taiwan? The answer is
that there is a powerful strategic rationale
for China—at the very least—to try to sever
Taiwan’s close ties with the United States
and neutralize Taiwan. However, the best
possible outcome for China, which it will
surely pursue with increasing vigor over
time, would be to make Taiwan part of
China.
Unification would work to China’s
strategic advantage in two important
ways. First, Beijing would absorb Taiwan’s
economic and military resources, thus
Taiwan’s Dire Straits
shifting the balance of power in Asia even
further in China’s direction. Second, Taiwan
is effectively a giant aircraft carrier sitting
off China’s coast; acquiring that aircraft
carrier would enhance China’s ability to
project military power into the western
Pacific Ocean.
In short, we see that nationalism as
well as realist logic give China powerful
incentives to put an end to Taiwan’s de facto
independence and make it part of a unified
China. This is clearly bad news for Taiwan,
especially since the balance of power in Asia
is shifting in China’s favor, and it will not
be long before Taiwan cannot defend itself
against China. Thus, the obvious question
is whether the United States can provide
security for Taiwan in the face of a rising
China. In other words, can Taiwan depend
on the United States for its security?
L
et us now consider America’s goals in
Asia and how they relate to Taiwan.
Regional hegemons go to great lengths to
stop other great powers from becoming
hegemons in their region of the world. The
best outcome for any great power is to be
the sole regional hegemon in the system. It
is apparent from the historical record that
the United States operates according to this
logic. It does not tolerate peer competitors.
During the twentieth century, there were
four great powers that had the capability
to make a run at regional hegemony:
Imperial Germany from 1900 to 1918,
Imperial Japan between 1931 and 1945,
Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945 and the
Soviet Union during the Cold War. Not
surprisingly, each tried to match what the
United States had achieved in the Western
Hemisphere.
How did the United States react? In each
case, it played a key role in defeating and
dismantling those aspiring hegemons.
The United States entered World War
I in April 1917 when Imperial Germany
March/April 2014 33
An increasingly powerful China is likely to attempt to push the
United States out of Asia, much the way the United States pushed
the European great powers out of the Western Hemisphere.
looked like it might win the war and rule
Europe. American troops played a critical
role in tipping the balance against the
Kaiserreich, which collapsed in November
1918. In the early 1940s, President
Franklin Roosevelt went to great lengths
to maneuver the United States into World
War II to thwart Japan’s ambitions in
Asia and Germany’s ambitions in Europe.
The United States came into the war
in December 1941, and helped destroy
both Axis powers. Since 1945, American
policy makers have gone to considerable
lengths to put limits on German and
Japanese military power. Finally, during
the Cold War, the United States steadfastly
worked to prevent the Soviet Union from
dominating Eurasia and then helped
relegate it to the scrap heap of history in
the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Shortly after the Cold War ended,
the George H. W. Bush administration’s
controversial “Defense Planning Guidance”
of 1992 was leaked to the press. It boldly
stated that the United States was now the
most powerful state in the world by far
and it planned to remain in that exalted
position. In other words, the United States
would not tolerate a peer competitor.
That same message was repeated in
the famous 2002 National Security
Strategy issued by the George W. Bush
administration. There was much criticism
of that document, especially its claims
about “preemptive” war. But hardly a word
of protest was raised about the assertion
that the United States should check rising
powers and maintain its commanding
position in the global balance of power.
34 The National Interest
The bottom line is that the United
States—for sound strategic reasons—
worked hard for more than a century to
gain hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.
Since achieving regional dominance, it
has gone to great lengths to prevent other
great powers from controlling either Asia or
Europe.
Thus, there is little doubt as to how
American policy makers will react if China
attempts to dominate Asia. The United
States can be expected to go to great lengths
to contain China and ultimately weaken it
to the point where it is no longer capable
of ruling the roost in Asia. In essence, the
United States is likely to behave toward
China much the way it acted toward the
Soviet Union during the Cold War.
China’s neighbors are certain to fear its
rise as well, and they too will do whatever
they can to prevent it from achieving
regional hegemony. Indeed, there is already
substantial evidence that countries like
India, Japan and Russia as well as smaller
powers like Singapore, South Korea
and Vietnam are worried about China’s
ascendancy and are looking for ways to
contain it. In the end, they will join an
American-led balancing coalition to check
China’s rise, much the way Britain, France,
Germany, Italy, Japan and even China
joined forces with the United States to
contain the Soviet Union during the Cold
War.
How does Taiwan fit into this story? The
United States has a rich history of close
relations with Taiwan since the early days
of the Cold War, when the Nationalist
forces under Chiang Kai-shek retreated
Taiwan’s Dire Straits
to the island from the Chinese mainland.
However, Washington is not obliged by
treaty to come to the defense of Taiwan if it
is attacked by China or anyone else.
Regardless, the United States will have
powerful incentives to make Taiwan
an important player in its anti-China
balancing coalition. First, as noted, Taiwan
has significant economic and military
resources and it is effectively a giant aircraft
carrier that can be used to help control the
waters close to China’s all-important eastern
coast. The United States will surely want
Taiwan’s assets on its side of the strategic
balance, not on China’s side.
Second, America’s commitment to
Taiwan is inextricably bound up with U.S.
credibility in the region, which matters
greatly to policy makers in Washington.
Because the United States is located roughly
six thousand miles from East Asia, it has to
work hard to convince its Asian
allies—especially Japan and
South Korea—that it will back
them up in the event they are
threatened by China or North
Korea. Importantly, it has to
convince Seoul and Tokyo that
they can rely on the American
nuclear umbrella to protect
them. This is the thorny problem
of extended deterrence, which
the United States and its allies
wrestled with throughout the
Cold War.
If the United States were to
sever its military ties with Taiwan
or fail to defend it in a crisis with
China, that would surely send a
strong signal to America’s other
allies in the region that they
cannot rely on the United States
for protection. Policy makers
in Washington will go to great
lengths to avoid that outcome
and instead maintain America’s
Taiwan’s Dire Straits
reputation as a reliable partner. This means
they will be inclined to back Taiwan no
matter what.
While the United States has good reasons
to want Taiwan as part of the balancing
coalition it will build against China, there
are also reasons to think this relationship
is not sustainable over the long term. For
starters, at some point in the next decade or
so it will become impossible for the United
States to help Taiwan defend itself against
a Chinese attack. Remember that we are
talking about a China with much more
military capability than it has today.
In addition, geography works in China’s
favor in a major way, simply because Taiwan
is so close to the Chinese mainland and so
far away from the United States. When it
comes to a competition between China and
the United States over projecting military
power into Taiwan, China wins hands
March/April 2014 35
down. Furthermore, in a fight over Taiwan,
American policy makers would surely be
reluctant to launch major attacks against
Chinese forces on the mainland, for fear
they might precipitate nuclear escalation.
This reticence would also work to China’s
advantage.
One might argue that there is a simple
way to deal with the fact that Taiwan will
not have an effective conventional deterrent
against China in the not-too-distant future:
put America’s nuclear umbrella over Taiwan.
This approach will not solve the problem,
however, because the United States is not
going to escalate to the nuclear level if
Taiwan is being overrun by China. The
stakes are not high enough to risk a general
thermonuclear war. Taiwan is not Japan or
even South Korea. Thus, the smart strategy
for America is to not even try to extend its
nuclear deterrent over Taiwan.
There is a second reason the United
States might eventually forsake Taiwan: it
is an especially dangerous flashpoint, which
could easily precipitate a Sino-American
war that is not in America’s interest. U.S.
policy makers understand that the fate
of Taiwan is a matter of great concern to
Chinese of all persuasions and that they
will be extremely angry if it looks like the
United States is preventing unification. But
that is exactly what Washington will be
doing if it forms a close military alliance
with Taiwan, and that point will not be lost
on the Chinese people.
It is important to note in this regard that
Chinese nationalism, which is a potent
force, emphasizes how great powers like the
United States humiliated China in the past
when it was weak and appropriated Chinese
territory like Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Thus, it is not difficult to imagine crises
breaking out over Taiwan or scenarios in
which a crisis escalates into a shooting war.
After all, Chinese nationalism will surely
be a force for trouble in those crises, and
36 The National Interest
China will at some point have the military
wherewithal to conquer Taiwan, which will
make war even more likely.
There was no flashpoint between the
superpowers during the Cold War that
was as dangerous as Taiwan will be in a
Sino-American security competition. Some
commentators liken Berlin in the Cold
War to Taiwan, but Berlin was not sacred
territory for the Soviet Union and it was
actually of little strategic importance for
either side. Taiwan is different. Given how
dangerous it is for precipitating a war and
given the fact that the United States will
eventually reach the point where it cannot
defend Taiwan, there is a reasonable chance
that American policy makers will eventually
conclude that it makes good strategic sense
to abandon Taiwan and allow China to
coerce it into accepting unification.
All of this is to say that the United States
is likely to be somewhat schizophrenic
about Taiwan in the decades ahead. On one
hand, it has powerful incentives to make
it part of a balancing coalition aimed at
containing China. On the other hand, there
are good reasons to think that with the
passage of time the benefits of maintaining
close ties with Taiwan will be outweighed
by the potential costs, which are likely to
be huge. Of course, in the near term, the
United States will protect Taiwan and treat
it as a strategic asset. But how long that
relationship lasts is an open question.
S
o far, the discussion about Taiwan’s future has focused almost exclusively on
how the United States is likely to act toward
Taiwan. However, what happens to Taiwan in the face of China’s rise also depends
greatly on what policies Taiwan’s leaders and
its people choose to pursue over time. There
is little doubt that Taiwan’s overriding goal
in the years ahead will be to preserve its
independence from China. That aim should
not be too difficult to achieve for the next
Taiwan’s Dire Straits
decade, mainly because Taiwan is almost
certain to maintain close relations with the
United States, which will have powerful
incentives as well as the capability to protect Taiwan. But after that point Taiwan’s
strategic situation is likely to deteriorate in
significant ways, mainly because
China will be rapidly approaching
the point where it can conquer Taiwan even if the American military
helps defend the island. And, as
noted, it is not clear that the United States will be there for Taiwan
over the long term.
In the face of this grim future,
Taiwan has three options. First,
it can develop its own nuclear
deterrent. Nuclear weapons are the
ultimate deterrent, and there is no
question that a Taiwanese nuclear
arsenal would markedly reduce
the likelihood of a Chinese attack
against Taiwan.
Taiwan pursued this option in
the 1970s, when it feared American
abandonment in the wake of the
Vietnam War. The United States,
however, stopped Taiwan’s nuclear-weapons
program in its tracks. And then Taiwan
tried to develop a bomb secretly in the
1980s, but again the United States found
out and forced Taipei to shut the program
down. It is unfortunate for Taiwan that it
failed to build a bomb, because its prospects
for maintaining its independence would be
much improved if it had its own nuclear
arsenal.
No doubt Taiwan still has time to acquire
a nuclear deterrent before the balance of
power in Asia shifts decisively against it.
But the problem with this suggestion is that
both Beijing and Washington are sure to
oppose Taiwan going nuclear. The United
States would oppose Taiwanese nuclear
weapons, not only because they would
encourage Japan and South Korea to follow
Taiwan’s Dire Straits
suit, but also because American policy
makers abhor the idea of an ally being in
a position to start a nuclear war that might
ultimately involve the United States. To
put it bluntly, no American wants to be in
a situation where Taiwan can precipitate
a conflict that might result in a massive
nuclear attack on the United States.
China will adamantly oppose Taiwan
obtaining a nuclear deterrent, in large
part because Beijing surely understands
that it would make it difficult—maybe
even impossible—to conquer Taiwan.
What’s more, China will recognize that
Taiwanese nuclear weapons would facilitate
nuclear proliferation in East Asia, which
would not only limit China’s ability to
throw its weight around in that region,
but also would increase the likelihood
that any conventional war that breaks out
would escalate to the nuclear level. For
these reasons, China is likely to make it
manifestly clear that if Taiwan decides to
pursue nuclear weapons, it will strike its
nuclear facilities, and maybe even launch
March/April 2014 37
There was no flashpoint between the superpowers
during the Cold War that was as dangerous as Taiwan
will be in a Sino-American security competition.
a war to conquer the island. In short, it
appears that it is too late for Taiwan to
pursue the nuclear option.
Taiwan’s second option is conventional
deterrence. How could Taiwan make
deterrence work without nuclear weapons
in a world where China has clear-cut
military superiority over the combined
forces of Taiwan and the United States?
The key to success is not to be able to
defeat the Chinese military—that is
impossible—but instead to make China
pay a huge price to achieve victory. In other
words, the aim is to make China fight a
protracted and bloody war to conquer
Taiwan. Yes, Beijing would prevail in the
end, but it would be a Pyrrhic victory.
This strategy would be even more effective
if Taiwan could promise China that the
resistance would continue even after its
forces were defeated on the battlefield. The
threat that Taiwan might turn into another
Sinkiang or Tibet would foster deterrence
for sure.
This option is akin to Admiral Alfred
von Tirpitz’s famous “risk strategy,” which
Imperial Germany adopted in the decade
before World War I. Tirpitz accepted the
fact that Germany could not build a navy
powerful enough to defeat the mighty Royal
Navy in battle. He reasoned, however, that
Berlin could build a navy that was strong
enough to inflict so much damage on the
Royal Navy that it would cause London
to fear a fight with Germany and thus be
deterred. Moreover, Tirpitz reasoned that
this “risk fleet” might even give Germany
diplomatic leverage it could use against
Britain.
38 The National Interest
There are a number of problems with
this form of conventional deterrence, which
raise serious doubts about whether it can
work for Taiwan over the long haul. For
starters, the strategy depends on the United
States fighting side by side with Taiwan.
But it is difficult to imagine American
policy makers purposely choosing to fight
a war in which the U.S. military is not
only going to lose, but is also going to pay
a huge price in the process. It is not even
clear that Taiwan would want to fight such
a war, because it would be fought mainly
on Taiwanese territory—not Chinese
territory—and there would be death and
destruction everywhere. And Taiwan would
lose in the end anyway.
Furthermore, pursuing this option would
mean that Taiwan would be constantly in
an arms race with China, which would
help fuel an intense and dangerous security
competition between them. The sword of
Damocles, in other words, would always be
hanging over Taiwan.
Finally, although it is difficult to predict
just how dominant China will become in
the distant future, it is possible that it will
eventually become so powerful that Taiwan
will be unable to put up major resistance
against a Chinese onslaught. This would
certainly be true if America’s commitment
to defend Taiwan weakens as China morphs
into a superpower.
Taiwan’s third option is to pursue what
I will call the “Hong Kong strategy.” In
this case, Taiwan accepts the fact that it
is doomed to lose its independence and
become part of China. It then works hard
to make sure that the transition is peaceful
Taiwan’s Dire Straits
and that it gains as much autonomy as
possible from Beijing. This option is
unpalatable today and will remain so for
at least the next decade. But it is likely to
become more attractive in the distant future
if China becomes so powerful that it can
conquer Taiwan with relative ease.
So where does this leave Taiwan? The
nuclear option is not feasible, as neither
China nor the United States would accept
a nuclear-armed Taiwan. Conventional
deterrence in the form of a “risk strategy”
is far from ideal, but it makes sense as long
as China is not so dominant that it can
subordinate Taiwan without difficulty. Of
course, for that strategy to work, the United
States must remain committed to the
defense of Taiwan, which is not guaranteed
over the long term.
Once China becomes a superpower, it
probably makes the most sense for Taiwan
to give up hope of maintaining its de facto
independence and instead pursue the
“Hong Kong strategy.” This is definitely
not an attractive option, but as Thucydides
argued long ago, in international politics
“the strong do what they can and the weak
suffer what they must.”
By now, it should be glaringly apparent
that whether Taiwan is forced to give up
its independence largely depends on how
formidable China’s military becomes in
the decades ahead. Taiwan will surely do
everything it can to buy time and maintain
the political status quo. But if China
continues its impressive rise, Taiwan appears
destined to become part of China.
Taiwan’s Dire Straits
T
here is one set of circumstances under
which Taiwan can avoid this scenario.
Specifically, all Taiwanese should hope there
is a drastic slowdown in Chinese economic
growth in the years ahead and that Beijing
also has serious political problems on the
home front that work to keep it focused
inward. If that happens, China will not be
in a position to pursue regional hegemony
and the United States will be able to protect
Taiwan from China, as it does now. In essence, the best way for Taiwan to maintain
de facto independence is for China to be
economically and militarily weak. Unfortunately for Taiwan, it has no way of influencing events so that this outcome actually
becomes reality.
When China started its impressive
growth in the 1980s, most Americans and
Asians thought this was wonderful news,
because all of the ensuing trade and other
forms of economic intercourse would
make everyone richer and happier. China,
according to the reigning wisdom, would
become a responsible stakeholder in the
international community, and its neighbors
would have little to worry about. Many
Taiwanese shared this optimistic outlook,
and some still do.
They are wrong. By trading with China
and helping it grow into an economic
powerhouse, Taiwan has helped create a
burgeoning Goliath with revisionist goals
that include ending Taiwan’s independence
and making it an integral part of China. In
sum, a powerful China isn’t just a problem
for Taiwan. It is a nightmare. n
March/April 2014 39
The Real Origins
of Realpolitik
By John Bew
I
n 1934, a young British historian
published his first book, The Italian
Problem in European Diplomacy, 1847–
1849. In it, he announced that a nation’s
foreign policy “is based upon a series of assumptions, with which statesmen have lived
since their earliest years and which they
regard as so axiomatic as hardly to be worth
stating.” It was the duty of the historian,
he wrote, “to clarify these assumptions and
to trace their influence upon the course of
every-day policy.”
By that apodictic verdict A. J. P. Taylor,
who soon became one of the greatest
British historians of the past century,
meant realpolitik, which he believed was
the true motor of international relations,
with moralism serving at best as a pious
smokescreen for a battle for power, or, as he
put it in the title of one of his best books,
for the struggle for mastery in Europe.
Since then, realpolitik has had its ups and
downs, both in Britain and America. In
the late 1930s, for example, it became a
convenient excuse among much of the
John Bew currently holds the Henry A. Kissinger
Chair in Foreign Policy and International
Relations at the John W. Kluge Center at the
Library of Congress. He is a reader in the War
Studies Department at King’s College London
and director of the International Centre for the
Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence. His
Castlereagh: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2012)
was named a book of the year by the Wall Street
Journal, Sunday Telegraph, Spectator and Total Politics.
40 The National Interest
British aristocracy for doing nothing in the
face of Nazi terror and aggression, but, then
again, it also underlay Winston Churchill’s
declaration that he would sup with the
devil to defeat Hitler, which is what he did
in forming a wartime alliance with Stalin.
Now that this elastic term is once again
coming back into vogue, it is worth taking
up Taylor’s challenge again.
For what does this portentous Teutonic
word actually mean and what implications,
if any, does it hold for the assumptions
of contemporary Western statesmen? As
realpolitik undergoes a renaissance in the
English-speaking world, it is surely worth
investigating what the word, coined in
1853, was originally supposed to entail. The
answer to that question might surprise but
will also enlighten. Real realpolitik has been
used and abused beyond all recognition
over the last 160 years. But the original
concept is still relevant to the challenges
of the twenty-first century, if not quite
in the way one might expect. It contains
notions within it that both bolster and act
as a useful counterweight and corrective to
the mantras of modern American realism.
Real realpolitik, you could say, is ripe for
excavation and rediscovery.
The reasons for the most recent return of
realpolitik are no mystery. The optimism
and sense of triumph which crept into
Anglo-American political culture following
the end of the Cold War and which peaked
with the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s
statue in Baghdad’s Firdos Square just over
The Real Origins of Realpolitik
The creation of the concept of realpolitik was an early attempt to
answer an enduring conundrum: how to achieve liberal, enlightened
goals in a world that does not follow liberal, enlightened rules.
ten years ago have been replaced by the
“return of history” and the “end of dreams.”
As periodically happens when the world
becomes a more challenging place, a slew
of new books on Niccolò Machiavelli have
appeared on both sides of the Atlantic,
including offerings by Jonathan Powell
(Tony Blair’s former chief of staff ) and
Philip Bobbitt. Last December, in a review
of four recent books on the Florentine
statesman in the Atlantic, Michael
Ignatieff announced the coming of the
latest “Machiavellian moment” (a phrase
introduced by the historian J. G. A. Pocock
in 1975). By that he meant “an instance
when public necessity requires actions that
private ethics and religious values might
condemn as unjust and immoral.” Other
familiar heroes of realpolitik—such as Lord
Castlereagh and Count Metternich (the
focus of Henry Kissinger’s A World Restored)
and Otto von Bismarck and George F.
Kennan—are also enjoying a return to
prestige.
This time around, realpolitik also has
some new friends and unlikely advocates.
The most liberal president to inhabit the
White House in many years has been as
realist as any of his predecessors in the
conduct of foreign affairs, with a zero-sum
security policy in which “interests” are
paramount. Last May, the German weekly
Der Spiegel ran an article declaring that
President Obama was the heir to “Kissinger’s
realpolitik,” quoting National Interest
editor Jacob Heilbrunn to the effect that
he “may even start speaking about foreign
affairs with a German accent.” “Everybody
always breaks it down between idealist and
The Real Origins of Realpolitik
realist,” said Obama’s then chief of staff
Rahm Emanuel in April 2010. “If you had
to put him in a category, he’s probably more
realpolitik, like Bush 41 . . . you’ve got to be
cold-blooded about the self-interests of your
nation.”
In the 1990s, some regarded realpolitik
as a thing of the past—a relic of the Cold
War and a “needs must” approach to the
world which could now be tossed into
the dustbin of history. Even at the height
of their influence, Western realpolitikers
have often faced resistance and criticism
from within their own societies. As a
foreign import, lifted from the heart of
the great Anglo-American bogeyman of
the two world wars, the word does not
sit comfortably alongside such soothing
terms as “enlightenment,” “morality”
and “virtue.” In a world where greatpower rivalries have returned, however,
realpolitik is once more discovering
a receptive audience. The chastening of
American ambitions in the Middle East
also allows realpolitikers to point out, with
some justification, that idealism can lead
to worse moral outcomes than the cool,
circumspect approach to statecraft that they
purport to employ.
So the exponents of realpolitik have
rediscovered their voice and their swagger.
Yet realpolitik is one of those words
borrowed from another language that is
much used but little understood. Its true
meaning remains occluded by the fact that
it has so often been caricatured—but also
because realpolitikers caricature the naive
idealists whom they set themselves up
against. “I will leave it to the self-described
March/April 2014 41
realists to explain in greater detail the origins
and meaning of ‘realism’ and ‘realpolitik’
to our confused journalists and politicos,”
said Robert Kagan in 2010, in a discussion
of President Obama’s realist credentials. In
fact, few satisfactory definitions exist, largely
because international-relations theorists
have remained uninterested in its historical
origins.
In picking up the gauntlet thrown down
by Kagan, then—to explore the origins
and meanings of realpolitik—one discovers
some surprising answers. Both realists and
their critics should take heed. Rediscovering
real realpolitik is, in fact, a more useful
exercise than simply dusting off a copy of
Machiavelli’s The Prince. We can do better
than revert to Renaissance-era statecraft
every time we get our fingers burned. That
is because real realpolitik was born in an
era that more closely resembles the one in
which we find ourselves today. It emerged
in mid-nineteenth-century Europe from
the collision of the Enlightenment with
the realities of power politics: a world that
was experiencing a unique combustion of
new ideas about freedom and social order
alongside rapid industrialization, class war,
sectarianism, great-power rivalry and the
rise of nationalism. In other words, it was
a response to the quintessential dilemmas
of modernity, some of which we are still
grappling with today.
Above all, the creation of the concept of
realpolitik was an early attempt to answer
a conundrum that has been at the heart of
Anglo-American foreign policy ever since:
how to achieve liberal, enlightened goals
in a world that does not follow liberal,
enlightened rules; and how to ensure
political and social progress in an unstable
and unpredictable environment.
R
ealpolitik is not, as is often assumed,
as old as statecraft itself. Nor is it
part of a seamless creed stretching back
42 The National Interest
to Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes and
Richelieu, though, as Jonathan Haslam
points out in No Virtue Like Necessity: Realist Thought in International Relations since
Machiavelli, it has a place within it. It is
something distinct from raison d’état, strategic thought or Machiavellianism—though
all played a part in its formulation.
Realpolitik is of more recent vintage. The
neologism was invented by the German
thinker Ludwig August von Rochau in his
1853 treatise Grundsätze der Realpolitik
(The Principles of Realpolitik). Rochau, who
added a second volume in 1869 and wrote a
total of eleven books, is a largely forgotten
figure today. His work has attracted
comment in his homeland, including
Natascha Doll’s perspicuous 2005 study,
but has never been translated into English
and there are no extended discussions of
his life and work in the English language
(notable exceptions here are brief mentions
in Jonathan Haslam’s history of realism
and James Sheehan’s work on nineteenthcentury German liberalism).
So who was Rochau and what did he
mean by the word realpolitik? Rochau, to
borrow a loaded phrase, was what might
be called a “liberal mugged by reality.”
The illegitimate son of an officer of the
Braunschweig hussars, he was a publicist,
journalist and radical participant in the
Vormärz, the movement for liberal political
reform in the German states. The efforts
of this liberal movement—like those
of its sister movements across Europe—
culminated in the rebellions of 1848, which
were intended to establish constitutional
and representative government. Rochau,
who had been forced into exile before the
uprising, tried to attain a seat in the liberal
Frankfurt Parliament, which was established
that year. Although he failed, he became a
well-known figure in the National Liberal
Party and eventually became a deputy in the
German Reichstag in 1871.
The Real Origins of Realpolitik
In some respects, the 1848
revolutions were nineteenth-century
Europe’s equivalent of the Arab
Spring. Uprisings that began in the
name of freedom and constitutional
rights quickly fell victim to other
political phenomena. The liberal
gains of 1848 were soon lost as
the would-be revolutionaries
were swatted down by coercive
governments who restored their
authority or were overtaken by more
powerful social forces such as class,
religion and nationalism.
The liberal dream of a united
Germany under the rule of law
was thwarted. In the multifarious
states and principalities of Germany,
autocrats, monarchists and the
landed classes quickly reestablished
their control and scattered the
revolutionaries into prison or exile.
Over the following two decades,
Germany was indeed to be united
but not by the means that the men of 1848
envisaged. Rather than constitutionalism
and representative government, it was the
“blood and iron” of the Prussian chancellor,
Otto von Bismarck, that forged the creation
of the German Empire in 1871.
Nor was this all. In France, the Second
Republic was established in early 1848 and
the French people were granted universal
suffrage. But democracy did not prove to be
a vehicle for liberalism, as might have been
expected. The people (chiefly the peasants)
elected Napoleon’s nephew Louis, who used
this mandate to abolish the representative
assembly, marginalize the liberals and
install himself as emperor in 1852. It
was the implosion of the 1848 French
revolution that Karl Marx wrestled with
four years later in The Eighteenth Brumaire
of Louis Napoleon, noting—referring to
the resurrection of Bonapartism—that
history tends to repeat itself, “the first time
The Real Origins of Realpolitik
as tragedy, the second time as farce.” In
Italy, meanwhile, where Rochau also visited,
a series of local rebellions were swiftly
suppressed.
As Rochau watched the dreams of the
liberals dissipate in smoke, he thought it
time for some hard thinking. Liberals had
to get real. “The castles that they have built
in the air have evaporated into blue mist,”
he wrote. “A work that had begun with
aimless enthusiasm and carried out with an
overestimation of one’s capabilities ended in
dishonour and injury.”
It was as an antidote to their failure to
understand the nature of power and politics
that this budding realist invoked the need
for a new realpolitik. This was juxtaposed
with “idealpolitik,” which had inspired
Rochau and his comrades but won them
no real gains. “Realpolitik does not move
in a foggy future, but in the present’s field
of vision,” he wrote. “It does not consider
March/April 2014 43
For those watching the rise of the German nation from outside,
realpolitik soon became a byword for German dastardliness.
its task to consist in the realisation of ideals,
but in the attainment of concrete ends.”
Rochau was far from ready to give up on
the ideas he had held so far. In his view, the
great achievement of modernity had been
to undermine the notion that might is right
in politics—or that kings or certain classes
had a God-given right to rule because they
were strong. But that did not mean liberals
could simply dismiss the laws of politics. In
making such progress, they had mistakenly
assumed that the “law of the strong” had
simply evaporated overnight. In reality,
this law was as unavoidable as the “law
of gravity over the material world.” The
foundational truth of politics was the link
between power (Macht) and dominance
(Herrschaft).
Rather than abandoning his liberalism,
he challenged his fellow liberals to
think of smarter ways to achieve their
goals. They had much to fight for. The
regimes that had been restored after
1848 were “anachronisms” because they
did not adequately reflect the balance of
social forces within German society. The
only viable government for Germany,
he argued, was one that was constructed
around and harnessed the full potential
of the Mittelstand (the middle classes).
But the intellectual progress made by the
Enlightenment had hit the brick wall of
reality. To get through that wall, it needed
more than ideological purity. When it
became “a matter of trying to bring down
the walls of Jericho, the Realpolitik thinks
that lacking better tools, the most simple
pickaxe is more effective than the sound of
the most powerful trumpets.”
44 The National Interest
The strange afterlife of realpolitik
showed just how difficult it was for
liberals to balance their ideals with a true
understanding of means and ends. After
Rochau, the concept became entrusted
into the hands of the historian and fellow
National Liberal politician Heinrich von
Treitschke, a virulent anti-Semite—his
credo was “the Jews are our misfortune”—
who set out to show the German people
“how brilliant Realpolitik is.” But
Treitschke’s influence—and his ideas of
racial struggle and war—represented an
increasingly rightward turn in German
liberalism. Among the National Liberals,
liberal values were increasingly subordinated
to the German national cause, which
had been seized upon and exploited by
Bismarck. Rochau had regarded antiSemitism as repugnant, absurd and
delusional.
Rochau remained a fierce critic and
opponent of Bismarck until his death in
1873. Bismarck’s government banned
the publication of the weekly journal
that Rochau edited in the 1860s. By a
strange twist of fate, however, the phrase
that Rochau coined became increasingly
associated with Bismarck himself. Detached
from its original meaning, it was used to
describe Bismarck’s brand of practical and
ruthless statecraft in the domestic and
international arena: his astute management
of different social forces within the state
and his ability to combine diplomacy with
the threat of force. Thus the true meaning
of realpolitik began to be drowned out as
it was harnessed by conservatives for a very
different cause. For those watching the
The Real Origins of Realpolitik
rise of the German nation from outside,
therefore, realpolitik soon became a byword
for German dastardliness.
F
rom its German origins, realpolitik
seeped into the English language (and
the Anglo-American conscience) in two
ways, and in two distinct waves. The first
was in the slow buildup of Anglo-German
antagonism in the late nineteenth century. For Britons, increasingly conscious
of threats to their position as the leading
global superpower, realpolitik—as practiced
by Bismarck and then the kaiser—was an
unpleasant and disconcerting discovery. It
was taken to imply cynical and uncivilized
conduct on the international stage—a lack
of respect for the treaties and laws that provided some semblance of order in global
affairs and a fetishization of naked selfinterest as an end in itself.
The first mention of realpolitik in the
English language came in 1872. It was in
a translation of an attack on Rochau by
the Prussian nationalist Constantin Frantz,
who believed that the very notion of
realpolitik betrayed the Christian spirit of
benevolence that was central to the essence
of liberalism. After this, the word was
barely mentioned again until the 1890s,
when it began to seep into the press with
growing frequency, as Wilhelmine Germany
became an increasingly aggressive and
assertive actor on the international stage.
Following Frantz, realpolitik was identified
as the source of a sort of gangrene in
German philosophy and intellectual life.
The traditions of Goethe and Kant, which
had been so admired in England, had been
marginalized by what seemed to be a neoMachiavellian obsession with power and the
interests of the state.
In 1895, the Times, for example,
bemoaned the fact that there were few
“survivors of a period when the oldfashioned idealism of the German character
The Real Origins of Realpolitik
had not been superseded by what is now
called ‘realpolitik.’” By 1904, as German
naval rearmament gained pace, the
Fortnightly Review noted how the German
state “works exclusively upon a science of
self-interest, more definitely methodized
than in any other Foreign Office, and
applied with more tenacious consistency.”
Not everyone accepted the implication
that realpolitik was a uniquely German
condition. In 1902, the English radical
economist J. A. Hobson published
Imperialism: A Study, in which he suggested
that the growing ambitions of the great
powers—reflected in colonialism and huge
military and naval rearmament programs—
were all symptoms of the same sickness. It
was a
greedy type of Machiavellianism, entitled “realpolitik” in Germany, where it was made, which
has remodelled the whole art of diplomacy and
has erected national aggrandisement without
pity or scruple as the conscious motive force of
foreign policy.
What Hobson called “earth hunger”—the
scramble for markets and resources and the
repudiation of treaty obligations—was reflected in the “sliding scale of diplomatic language” and words like “hinterland,
sphere of interest, sphere of influence, paramountcy, suzerainty, protectorate.” Even the
Americans, too, were being drawn into the
imperial game, engaging in what the Germans now called Weltpolitik (world politics).
In India, the philosopher Sarvepalli
Radhakrishnan, a future president of the
country, echoed Hobson’s views:
Realpolitik, which has for its principle, “It is
good when I steal your cow, and bad when you
steal my cow,” has been the governing force of
European relations all these four or five centuries. Self-interest is the end; brute-force, the
means; conscience is taboo.
March/April 2014 45
The Great War, he added, was “the penalty
which Europe pays for its steadfast loyalty
to a false ideal.”
O
f all the great powers, America came
late to realpolitik. It was, after all, in
Rochau’s pithy description, one of those
nations that “have hardly stepped out of
the shoes they wore as children.” Before
its entry into the Great War, America was
often chided in the English press for its lack
of understanding of the true nature of realpolitik, much as Rochau rebuked his liberal
colleagues for their naïveté about the nature
of politics after 1848.
In 1911, the British writer Sydney
Brooks—a regular contributor to
Harper’s—suggested that America was a
geographically cosseted nation and that its
understanding of international politics was
blunted by its relative security (a theme
recently revisited by John Mearsheimer in
The National Interest). Americans “live in
an atmosphere of extraordinary simplicity,
46 The National Interest
spaciousness, and self-absorption, until
from very boredom they are forced to
make international mountains out of
molehills, a diversion which by itself is
proof enough of their unique immunity
from the serious realities of Weltpolitik,”
Brooks wrote.
The exponential growth of American
power soon caused Europeans to adjust
their opinions about the American capacity
for realpolitik. As pressure grew on the
United States to enter the war in 1916,
Walter Weyl, the editor of the fledgling
New Republic and one of the intellectual
fathers of the progressive movement,
returned from a trip to Europe with some
advice for his countrymen. “They ascribe
to us more foresight than we possess,
not realizing how often we have happily
blundered into success, how often we
have pursued Realpolitik in our sleep.”
To illustrate the point, he recounted
a conversation he had with a German
academic about America’s position: “‘We
Germans,’ a Berlin professor recently
assured me, ‘write fat volumes about
Realpolitik but understand it no
better than babies in a nursery.’ ‘You
Americans,’ he added, I thought
enviously, ‘understand it far too well
to talk about it.’”
When Woodrow Wilson did
eventually take America into war in
1917, some of his supporters began
to style his support for democracy
and liberal values as a direct assault
on realpolitik. The word had begun
to seep into the American press in
preceding years. Like in England,
it was used interchangeably with
Ma c h i a ve l l i a n i s m , f o r w h i c h
the El Paso Herald provided
a helpful definition in 1918:
“Michiavellianism [sic]—
p r o n o u n c e d ‘m a k - e e - a h - v e l eean-izm.’ A term descriptive of
The Real Origins of Realpolitik
unscrupulous diplomacy. Derived from the
name of Machiavelli, a Florentine statesman
. . . Michiavellianism has been revived by
the Prussian military autocracy, and is called
Realpolitik.”
Wilson’s vision of politics—along
with his emphasis on liberal values—was
presented as a powerful alternative to the
shortsighted cynicism that realpolitik
seemed to denote. Wilsonianism was no
longer seen as naive; it was a potent weapon
in the international arena in its own right.
“How curious it is that these professors
of realpolitik in European chancelleries,
who lately saw nothing in the President but
an academist, and nothing in his phrases
but dreamy vaporings of the millennium,
should be changing their tune at this time!”
declared the Washington Herald in April
1917. “Of course diplomats and militarists
who deal exclusively in ‘facts’ and the
realities of force never see much farther
than their own noses.”
The irony of this was that Wilsonianism
was closer to Rochau’s version of realpolitik
than anyone imagined.
A
s the Great War turned in the Allies’
favor, and they began to write the victor’s version of its origins, realpolitik featured heavily in their explanations.
Sir Charles Waldstein, an Anglo-American
academic with extensive experience of
Germany, reiterated the common view
that it had been part of the poisoning of
German philosophy and political culture in
the years preceding the war: “Real-Politik
and Interressen-Politik were constantly in
the mouths of its leaders, from the Kaiser
down to the political stump-speaker.” Even
the British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour,
stated in 1918 that “Realpolitik . . . has
been the true and dominating doctrine of
every important German statesman,
German soldier, and German thinker for
two generations at least.”
The Real Origins of Realpolitik
Liberal Germans, Rochau’s true heirs,
also joined in the criticism. Father W.
Foerster, an exiled German pacifist,
educationalist and ethicist, said the country
had succumbed to “hallucinations of
‘Realpolitik’” that were brought on by a
destructive sense of national superiority:
In spite, therefore, of all our talk of “Realpolitik,” we have remained altogether incapable of
assessing the surrounding world objectively, or
of emerging from our own drunken egoism;
and this especially because, in addition, a fundamentally false political philosophy has taught
us to look upon egoism as the only true world
policy.
By the end of the Great War, therefore,
realpolitik was already taken to mean a
variety of sins—which were long removed
from anything that Rochau had written
in 1853. These included militarism,
illiberalism, imperialism, naked self-interest
and recklessness in the international
arena. Realpolitik was understood not
as a science of realism but, rather, as a
glaring symptom of what had gone wrong
in Germany. Insofar as other nations had
participated in it, they had contributed to
the unprecedented death and destruction of
the Great War.
First Wilsonianism, and later the
construction of the League of Nations, were
conceived as an antidote to the realpolitik
that had seeped into international affairs
in the years before 1914. Realpolitik was to
remain a dirty word in the Anglo-American
world in the interwar years.
T
he second way Central European realism—and realpolitik more specifically—seeped into Western political consciousness was through the wave of German
emigrant intellectuals who arrived in America before and after the Second World War.
This brought a raft of uniquely talented
March/April 2014 47
historians and theologians such as Reinhold
Niebuhr, Hans Morgenthau, Fritz Kraemer,
Felix Gilbert and Henry Kissinger. In addition, the Dutch American Nicholas J. Spykman, who taught at Yale, made an important contribution to the establishment of
classical realist thought in postwar America.
By the outbreak of the Second World
War, realpolitik was sufficiently established
in the American political lexicon to no
longer need elaborate definition. It had
crept into discussions about Hollywood in
the 1930s, as some called for an “awakened
sense of Realpolitik” in the movie industry
as a corrective to the “sugar-coated”
endings that contributed to the decline
of cinema audiences in the period of the
Great Depression. In 1940, the journal
American Speech included it in a list of loan
words from Germany that had become
increasingly prevalent in the American press
in the preceding years, alongside some other
unfortunate imports: Reich, gestapo and
putsch.
As those who had been trained in the way
of German realism recognized, it was not a
word with which one would typically want
to associate oneself in this period. Despite
the fact that they were entirely cognizant
of the Mitteleuropean origins of realpolitik,
the German émigrés generally steered clear
of using the term.
In his 1951 In Defense of the National
Interest, for example, Hans Morgenthau
largely concealed the German influences
in his thought and emphasized an Englishlanguage canon of realist thinking, which
included the Federalist Papers and Lord
Castlereagh’s work as British foreign
secretary at the time of the Congress of
Vienna.
Morgenthau’s critics recognized the
sleight of hand. A review in the Economist
declared his book to be the latest addition
to the now “considerable American
library of sermons based on the theology
48 The National Interest
of realpolitik.” In 1952, he was attacked
by the Austrian American theorist Frank
Tannenbaum, who stated that “the
advocates of Realpolitik would sweep away
all of our old beliefs as foolish, sentimental,
and moralistic.” Carl J. Friedrich, another
émigré and a theorist of totalitarianism,
called Morgenthau’s book “an American
version of the German Realpolitik.”
Even by the time Morgenthau expanded
his views in 1960 in The Purpose of
American Politics, which he defined as
“the achievement of freedom,” yet another
émigré, the Marxist intellectual Herbert
Marcuse, wrote to him asking what “might
have driven the theorist of Realpolitik to
transcend Realpolitik.”
Typically, it was President Obama’s
favorite philosopher, Reinhold Niebuhr,
who in 1944 came closest to finding a
happy medium between what he called
“the most rarified heights of constitutional
idealism” and “the depths of realpolitik.”
For the most part, however, anything
resembling traditional German raison d’état
was seized upon by the critics of the realist
school as the most recent incarnation of
realpolitik. Leo Strauss, another German
émigré, was perhaps the most vigilant
of all, comparing Machiavelli, whom he
believed had lowered men’s sights, to the
“teacher of evil.” In The Road to Serfdom,
Friedrich Hayek wrote that if the West
were to convince Germans that there was
an alternative to Nazism, it would “not
be by concessions to their system of
thought.” According to him, “We shall not
delude them with a stale reproduction of
the ideas of their fathers which we have
borrowed from them—be it state socialism,
Realpolitik, ‘scientific’ planning, or
corporativism.”
The label was hard to shake. “The
advocates of a realist foreign policy
are caricatured with the German term
Realpolitik,” noted Kissinger many years
The Real Origins of Realpolitik
later, “I suppose to facilitate the choosing
of sides.”
T
he Cold War—and perhaps above
all, the association with Kissinger—
breathed new life into realpolitik and meant
that the term outlasted the vituperative debates of the 1940s and 1950s. To this day,
the word also enjoys a unique position in
contemporary political discourse in that
it is one of the few terms in internationalrelations theory that practitioners and diplomats both recognize and use.
In the Frontline Diplomacy archive at
the Library of Congress, which contains
transcripts of 1,743 interviews with senior
American diplomats from the postwar era
to the present day, the word realpolitik
appears in fifty-seven of those interviews,
often with expansive expositions as to what
it means to the interviewee.
In truth, in contemporary usage,
realpolitik has become
interchangeable with “realism”
or “realistic.” Simply speaking,
it denotes an unflinching and
nonideological approach to
statecraft and the primacy of
the raison d’état. It involves
an intuitive suspicion of
grandstanding and moralizing
on the international stage. In
theory, it most closely resembles
Morgenthau’s contention that a
nation could not “escape . . . into
a realm where action is guided
by moral principles rather than
by considerations of power.”
More recent versions of this creed
include the neorealist theories
advanced by the prominent
political scientist Kenneth Waltz,
who died recently. Weighty
disputes between the champions
of liberal institutionalism, rationalchoice theory and realism continue
The Real Origins of Realpolitik
to dominate the international-relations
field. But it is realism that holds the oldest
pedigree and attracts the most ire.
The Frontline Diplomacy archive
demonstrates that usage of realpolitik peaked
in the 1970s in the Nixon-Carter era.
About half of diplomats viewed it positively,
and about half used it unfavorably, as
something with which they preferred not
to be associated. By the 1990s and with
the fall of the Soviet Union, perspectives
were changing. In 1991, at the end of the
Gulf War, a provocative editorial in the Wall
Street Journal suggested that the power of
twenty-four-hour news television presented
a serious challenge to traditional notions
of realpolitik. “We recognize that there
are significant dangers in trying to create
a foreign policy that must incorporate the
imperatives of national interest, a common
national morality and the information
stream of global communications,” it noted,
March/April 2014 49
Much of what masquerades as modern realpolitik has
strayed quite far from the original essence of the term.
but “Realpolitik is not so readily separated
from national values, from a country’s
common idea of itself.”
But in its journey from 1853 to the
modern day, it has been purged of much
of its original meaning. It has become a
label or a badge of identification. In that
sense, the hand-wringing about realpolitik
is, as much as anything, part of an internal
monologue in Western liberalism rather
than a fully developed view of world affairs.
For both its critics and its advocates, it is
used to denote a philosophical disposition—
an instinct or an inclination—rather than
a hardheaded way of analyzing political
circumstances on a case-by-case basis.
President Obama’s imaginative use
of Reinhold Niebuhr’s work—the subtle
strains of which crept into his Nobel Peace
Prize speech in 2009—to explain his liberal
realism does not, in that sense, represent
the true spirit of realpolitik. It is, like much
before it, an attempt to square the circle—
to articulate an intellectually coherent
worldview. Like much of the scholarly
practice of international relations, this is
theology rather than realpolitik.
W
hat, then, would Rochau have made
of all this? Going back to his original
definition, it appears that much of what
masquerades as modern realpolitik has
strayed quite far from the original essence
of the term.
The first thing to note is that he was an
enemy of lazy thinking. He would have
been unimpressed with those versions of
realism that resemble a knee-jerk reaction
that responds to idealism with a roll of the
50 The National Interest
eyes and retreats to its own set of tropes and
doctrines.
Realpolitik does “not entail the
renunciation of individual judgement and
it requires least of all an uncritical kind
of submission,” he wrote. It was more
“appropriate to think of it as a mere
measuring and weighing and calculating of
facts that need to be processed politically.”
Above all, it was not a strategy itself, but
a way of thinking: an “enemy of . . . selfdelusion” and “the misguided pride which
characterises the human mind.”
What Rochau was attempting to
articulate was not a philosophical position
but a new way of understanding politics
and the distribution of power. “Experience
has shown that treating it along abstractscientific lines, or on the basis of principles
is hardly useful,” he wrote. One had to
contend “with the historical product,
accepting it as it is, with an eye for its
strengths and weaknesses, and to remain
otherwise unconcerned with its origins and
the reasons for its particular characteristics.”
Here, once again, his work is distinct
from the Renaissance statecraft of
Machiavelli because of its attempt to
incorporate the conditions of modernity
into his analysis. Sovereignty was not the
natural property of God, the king, the
people or the aristocracy. It was simply a
reflection of the balance of different societal
forces. The best forms of government were
those that mediated between them most
effectively; for this observation Rochau was
indebted to the Scottish Enlightenment,
Edmund Burke and the French social
theorist Charles Fourier. In the race among
The Real Origins of Realpolitik
nations, the most successful state would
be the one that harnessed the energies and
industry of its most productive classes to
the cause of the nation. By this he chiefly
meant the middle classes, by virtue of their
“education, wealth, entrepreneurial spirit,
and appetite for work.” In the Renaissance
era it had been easier to suppress new
societal forces that challenged the authority
of the state, but the “increased mobility of
the more recent centuries” had made this
impossible.
At the same time, however, modernity
also presented social and political forces—
such as sectarianism or ignorance—which
also had to be taken into account. A true
realpolitiker could not ignore “those latent
forces of habit, tradition and sluggishness”
such as “poverty, lack of knowledge, and
prejudice” and even “immorality.” Here
again, modernity intervened. The “great
masses,” too, which “formerly appeared
only in exceptional situations in the
political arena,” were now an established
fact of political life.
Above all, however, in a lesson that
modern realists often miss, Rochau refused
to dismiss the power of ideas and ideology.
“Things like bourgeois class consciousness,
the idea of freedom, nationalism, the idea
of human equality are completely new
factors of social life for many of today’s
states,” he wrote, and good policy should
not “deny these forces the appropriate
recognition.” Such manifestations of “public
opinion,” as Rochau called it, “can be
potentially very influential and a force that
even oriental despotism has to bow to.”
Indeed, it was as a theorist of public
opinion that Rochau was perhaps at his
most original. He painstakingly laid out
different gradations of it, in ascending
order of importance. In the first instance,
he believed that the “feeble self-conscious
opinion of the day is not entitled to claim
political consideration,” as it was merely
The Real Origins of Realpolitik
fleeting and unfocused. From this starting
point, however, the more “consolidated it
becomes, and the more it transforms itself
into a firm conviction, the more important
it becomes for the state.” The most
important expression of public opinion
was “Volksglaube” (popular belief ), which
should always be treated with “care and
protection, not blandishment.”
While the popular belief was the highest
“peak” of popular opinion, the zeitgeist
was its broadest foundation and a central
component of realpolitik. The zeitgeist
amounted to the “consolidated opinion
of the century as expressed in certain
principles, opinions and habits of reason.”
An opinion transformed itself into the
zeitgeist to the extent that it stood the test
of time. And the zeitgeist represented “in all
circumstances the most important influence
on the overall direction of politics.” For a
March/April 2014 51
state to “enforce its own aims in defiance of
the zeitgeist” was to court serious trouble.
Realpolitik, therefore, was much more
than raison d’état. In fact, Rochau made
this distinction clear: “Statecraft, as its
name suggests, is nothing more than the
art of success, applied to the specific ends of
the state.”
Realpolitik was about the art of politics
in the post-Enlightenment world. He wrote
in an age of mass ideological awakening,
economic transformation, social upheaval
and international rivalry. The job of
statesmen was not to remain studiously
aloof from these forces but rather to
manage and mediate them. For Rochau,
too, patriotism and nationalism were not
delusions and distractions from raison d’état
but one of its most effective tools. A shared
sense of national purpose was a “natural
conciliatory force” between conflicting
parties within a state. This was why “human
judgement has been very firm regarding
the view that it is the utmost sacrilege to
question the national spirit (Nationalgeist),
the last and most valuable guarantee of
the natural order of society.” Any policies
designed to break this spirit, or ignore it,
“thereby descend to the lowest ranks of
despicability.”
Most importantly, Rochau was a critic
of utopianism, not idealism. As befitted a
man of the Enlightenment, he understood
that ideology played the “role of a harbinger
and trailblazer of events.” “Realpolitik
would contradict itself if it were to deny
the rights of the intellect, of ideas, of
religion or any other of the moral forces to
52 The National Interest
which the human soul renders homage,”
he wrote. The political importance of
ideas was not dependent on how rational
or noble they were. On the one hand, it
was common that “the most beautiful
ideal that enthuses noble souls is a political
nullity.” When it came to “phantasms” like
“eternal peace,” international fraternity and
equality, with “no will and no force” behind
them, “Realpolitik passes by shrugging its
shoulders.” On the other hand, he noted—
casting his eyes to the socialist movement
emerging in Germany at the time—“the
craziest chimera may become a very serious
realpolitical matter.”
“Formless ideas, impulses, emotional
surges, melodic slogans, naively accepted
catchwords . . . [and] habitual selfdelusions”—these were the targets that
Rochau had in mind when he published
The Principles of Realpolitik in 1853. By
the time he wrote the second volume of
his book fifteen years later, however, he
had already recognized that the word
he had coined had taken on a life of its
own: liberals condemned it out of hand;
conservatives adopted it without actually
understanding what it meant. Looking
at the way realpolitik has been used since
that time, one can see that old habits die
hard. For some the word has become a
synonym for evil; for others it has been an
accoutrement of sophistication. “I reject
at this occasion the criticism which has
been levelled at the title of my book from
different directions,” Rochau wrote, with a
hint of exhaustion, “if not so much against
the content itself.” n
The Real Origins of Realpolitik
Frack to the Future
By Leonardo Maugeri
T
he world has been caught by surprise by the United States’ shale-oil
boom. Analysts and experts are still
clashing about both its true extent and the
possibility of extending a shale revolution
beyond North America. In just a few years
shale oil could make the United States the
world’s top oil producer. But a shale revolution is unlikely in the rest of the world, due
to some unique factors that characterize the
U.S. oil and gas patch. The single-minded
focus on the future of shale oil, however,
risks obscuring another evolving dimension
of the global oil picture that defies the past
pessimism spread by peak-oil theorists who
claimed that shortages loomed: beyond the
United States, the world’s oil-production
capacity is also growing much faster than
demand.
So far, this imbalance has been offset
by two things: continuous outages of
existing oil supply affecting several Arab
and African countries, and the recurring
fears of escalating crises in the Middle East.
But supply capacity is bound to grow in
the future as well, so that unless demand
rebounds strongly in the next few years, a
significant downturn of oil prices may well
occur. The connections among a number
of factors—the U.S. shale boom, the global
Leonardo Maugeri is a senior associate at the
Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for
Science and International Affairs and chairman of
Ironbark Investments llc. He was formerly a top
manager of the Italian oil and gas company Eni.
Frack to the Future
rise of oil supply, and the inner volatility
of oil prices due to temporary outages
and political crises—provide a somewhat
contradictory picture of the global oil
market. These contradictions may, in turn,
trigger unexpected changes in the direction
of the oil market. All of these changes
may have deep and sometimes paradoxical
consequences for U.S. energy security.
T
here are several issues in the current
debate over the boom in so-called U.S.
tight and shale oil (hereafter referred to as
shale oil) that serve to reinforce extreme
and seemingly irreconcilable attitudes. One
of the central questions revolves around
the real potential of this boom and can be
formulated simply as follows: Is oil production from shale formations just a temporary
bubble, or is it capable of significantly altering the U.S.—and possibly global—energy
outlook? To answer this question, I studied
more than four thousand shale wells, along
with the activities of about one hundred oil
companies involved in shale-oil exploitation. The main results of this analysis are
multifaceted. On the one hand, the large resource size and the ability of the industry to
develop it through steady improvements in
technology and cost suggest that the United
States may become the largest global oil
producer in just a few years, and maintain
a high output for many years to come. The
U.S. shale-oil boom is thus not a temporary
bubble but a long-term, transformational
phenomenon.
March/April 2014 53
The U.S. shale-oil boom is not a temporary bubble
but a long-term, transformational phenomenon.
However, the unique characteristics
of shale oil—the drilling intensity in
particular—make it vulnerable to both
price drops and environmental opposition
in new and populated areas. What’s more,
shale development benefits from some
specific factors that are especially present in
the United States but not worldwide, and
that makes the global extension of a shale
boom unlikely, at least in this decade. Even
with a steady decline of crude-oil prices (for
example, from $85 per barrel in 2013 to
$65 per barrel in 2017), the United States
could be producing 5 million barrels per day
(mbd) of shale oil by 2017. With the present
output of 1.5 mbd, that would more than
triple the current production. More than 90
percent of such production will come from
just three large shale-oil formations: BakkenThree Forks (North Dakota), Eagle Ford
(Texas) and Permian Basin (Texas). Together
with a relatively resilient production of
conventional oil, an increasing production
of natural-gas liquids (ngls) and a steady
output of biofuels (ngls and biofuels are
considered part of the overall oil production
in most statistical sources), the United States
could become the leading oil producer in the
world by the end of 2017, with an overall
oil production of about 16 mbd and a sheer
crude-oil production of 10.4 mbd.
Reinforcing this prospect is the resilience
of U.S. conventional-oil production, once
deemed bound to decline irreversibly. In
fact, thanks to the extensive application of
advanced technology to mature and oncedeclining oil fields, U.S. conventionaloil production is also doing better than
generally expected.
54 The National Interest
Among the fourteen main oil-producing
states or areas of the United States, so far
nine have already witnessed a reverse of
their declining oil production. What’s more,
the relative decline in the Gulf of Mexico
is just a result of postponed development
following the Deepwater Horizon incident
in 2010. Yet the driving force behind the
U.S. oil boom—namely, its huge shale-oil
potential—depends crucially on the U.S.
oil industry’s ability to bring on line an
astonishing number of wells each year. In
fact, the extremely low porosity of shale
reservoir rocks limits the recoverability
of oil from one single well. On average,
each loses 50 percent of its output after
twelve months of activity; by the end of
the fifth year of production, output almost
stabilizes around 8–10 percent of initial
production. To offset this dramatic decline
in production, an oil company must thus
drill an ever-increasing number of wells.
For example, in December 2012 it
was necessary to bring ninety new wells
on stream each month to maintain the
production rate at Bakken-Three Forks (so
far, the largest shale-oil play in the United
States)—770,000 barrels per day. But as
production grows in North Dakota, the
number of producing wells also must grow
exponentially. Given the current state of
knowledge and technology, the growth of
shale-oil production is based on a “drill
or die” logic that is not that easy to apply
elsewhere. The large and less populated
areas of North Dakota and Texas are
capable of sustaining such ever-increasing
drilling intensity for many years to come—
to over one hundred thousand active shale-
Frack to the Future
oil wells, compared to
around ten thousand to
date. This relies on an
approach called “down
spacing,” which means
increasing the density of
wells within an area. Oil
companies are realizing
that it is possible to drill
more wells in the same
area without provoking
a negative interference
between one well and
another. Nevertheless,
the “drill or die” logic
will probably represent
a major obstacle to the expansion of
shale activity even in most areas of the
United States that—unlike Texas, North
Dakota and a bunch of additional
states—are densely populated, and have
neither vast territories nor a long history
of drilling intensity. In fact, in the eye
of public opinion and local residents,
drilling intensity will likely emphasize the
environmental problems associated with
shale activity, triggering in several states a
vigorous opposition to the expansion of
such activities.
W
hile drilling intensity may prove a
limiting factor in expanding shale
activity in the United States outside of
its core areas, it will likely prove an insurmountable obstacle for the rest of the
world—for several reasons. First, the United
States holds more than 60 percent of the
world’s drilling rigs, and 95 percent of these
are capable of performing horizontal drilling that, together with hydraulic fracturing (fracking), is crucial to unlocking shale
production. No other country or area in the
world has even a fraction of such “drilling
power,” which takes several years to build
up. For example, all across Europe (excluding Russia) there are no more than 130
Frack to the Future
drilling rigs (compared to 180 in North
Dakota alone), and only one-third of them
are capable of doing horizontal drilling.
And it’s not only a problem of drilling rigs.
Shale activity also requires highly specialized
tools and people that are in short supply in
the world—and all this also requires years
to be built up. Moreover, no other country
has ever experienced the drilling intensity
that has always characterized America’s oil
and gas history.
In 2012, the United States completed
45,468 oil and gas wells (and brought
28,354 of them on line). Excluding
Canada, the rest of the world completed
only 3,921 wells, and brought only a
fraction of them on line. To my knowledge,
Saudi Arabia brings on line no more than
two hundred wells per year. Other factors
will contribute to prevent the development
of shale resources in the rest of the world.
One is the absence of private mineral rights
in most countries. In the United States,
landowners also own the resources under
the ground—and have a very strong
incentive to lease those rights; in the rest of
the world, such resources usually belong to
the state, so that landowners often receive
nothing from drilling on their lands apart
from the damage created by such activity.
March/April 2014 55
Also absent outside North America are
independent oil companies with a guerrillalike mind-set, a crucial aspect of the U.S.
boom. Until now, the development of
shale resources has not proved to be Big
Oil’s strength—since shale oil requires
companies capable of operating on a small
scale, pursuing a number of objectives and
leveraging short-term opportunities. Only
the United States (and partly Canada)
possesses a plethora of such aggressive
companies. It is no accident that they have
been, and still are, the avatars of the shale
revolution. Finally, we don’t even know
with any reasonable accuracy either the real
size of the shale formations in the world or
the cost associated with their development.
Indeed, the geology of the United States
is by far the best known, explored and
assessed with respect to any other country.
As a consequence, global shale deposits
outside North America are still just a matter
of pure speculation.
H
uge as it may be, U.S. crude-production potential is still insufficient
to allow for the much-sought-after goal
of U.S. crude-oil independence—the only
missing point in the overall equation of
U.S. energy independence. America is already largely self-sufficient in terms of all
other primary-energy sources (coal, nuclear,
natural gas, ngls, etc.), while it still imports about half of its daily consumption of
crude oil, which is now a little more than
15 mbd. True, imports have plummeted
steadily from their peak in 2007 (when they
outpaced 10 mbd), and they will continue
to decline in the next few years. However,
even in the most favorable scenario outlined above, 25 percent of U.S. crude-oil
requirements will have to be imported in
the future.
This implies that if the United States
wants to target the highest degree of
oil security, it should rely not only
56 The National Interest
on an increase of its domestic crude-oil
production, but also on energy-efficiency
measures that could curtail crude-oil
consumption. Together with a structural
shift in consumers’ behavior, the latter has
already played a role in reducing American
addiction to oil—and that occurred well
before the economic crisis erupted in 2008.
The yearly total vehicles-miles traveled by
the American people peaked in 2006 at 3.1
billion, and is now down to less than 2.9
billion. On a per capita basis, the mileage
peak was reached in 2004 at around ten
thousand miles per year and then dropped
to the current 9,100 miles annually. Nor is
this all. Americans are not only consuming
less, but they are also consuming better—
choosing smaller, more efficient vehicles
or alternative modes of transportation,
whereas many among the younger seem to
have turned their backs to cultural patterns
which regarded the car as the embodiment
of emancipation. In short, it’s no longer
a caddy for daddy. The change is evident
both in the urban landscapes—which are
now punctuated by a large number of
midsize cars once abhorred by consumers—
and in the numbers: according to the
University of Michigan Transportation
Research Institute, in 2013 the average fuel
efficiency of passenger cars and light trucks
sold in the United States was close to 24.8
miles per gallon, up from 20.1 in October
2007.
Although it’s highly probable that
demand for oil has already peaked in the
United States, as it did in Europe in the
mid-1990s, and will follow a pattern of
secular decline, the economic recovery
will surely be accompanied by a rebound
in consumption of both cars and oil—a
phenomenon that is already showing up.
This, in turn, could reduce American
energy security. That’s why a sound
approach to energy security cannot look
just to supply, but also to consumption.
Frack to the Future
Whatever the degree of energy security and independence the United
States can achieve through the shale revolution, it will always be
inextricably linked to what happens across the global oil market.
What’s more, in terms of security it’s likely
that a lower rate of U.S. crude-oil imports
would have paradoxical consequences for
U.S. energy security. In fact, among the
most endangered foreign sources of supply
would be countries traditionally considered
to be “safe.” The most important of these is
Canada, because it relies almost completely
on the U.S. market as an export outlet for
its oil.
A shrinking U.S. market implies a
short- and medium-term blow to the
development of the massive potential of
Canadian oil sands that currently have no
alternative markets. This also explains why
the construction of additional pipelines
to the United States—such as the highly
debated Keystone XL—is key for Canada
if it wants to expand its oil production.
To a lesser extent, lower U.S. crude-oil
imports will pose challenges for Venezuela
and Mexico: along with Canada, these
“safe” oil exporters to the United States
will need to secure new, reliable markets
and partners for their crude in the future
so as not to be overly dependent (as in the
past) on the shrinking U.S. oil market. This
potential shift will represent an opportunity
for U.S. energy competitors like China,
and it will make the United States a bit
more vulnerable in the future to an oil
crisis because it will no longer be able to
count on the Western Hemisphere’s oil as
its almost-exclusive domain. Finally, even
the highest degree of oil independence
will not insulate the United States from
the global oil market. To the contrary, any
major event concerning the world’s oil will
always affect the United States and could
Frack to the Future
also endanger its own oil boom. The latter
possibility involves a careful consideration
of both global oil-production capacity and
demand, as well as the price of oil.
T
he continuation of the current U.S.
oil boom will require, at least in the
next few years, adequately high prices of
oil that, in turn, would allow for escalating shale activity. Such a scenario, however,
cannot be taken for granted because, almost
unnoticed, the world too is facing a production boom. By December 2013, actual oil
production reached almost 93.5 mbd. On
top of this, there were more than 2.5 mbd
that couldn’t be produced or marketed either because of different kind of disruptions
(mainly due to political tensions, strikes or
accidents in countries such as Libya, Egypt,
Nigeria and Sudan), or because of international sanctions against Iran. What’s more,
there were 3 mbd of voluntarily shut-in
production—what the oil-industry jargon
calls “spare capacity”—mostly concentrated
in Saudi Arabia.1 When actual production,
supply disruptions and spare capacity are
combined, the world seems to possess a potential oil-production capacity in excess of
99 mbd—also an all-time record.
1
Spare capacity is defined as the difference between
the total oil-production capacity (usually within a
country, or the world) that can be reached within
thirty days—and sustained for ninety days—and
the actual production. Generally, it’s voluntarily
shut in by a country (or group of countries) either
to avoid depressing the oil price, or to preserve a
cushion of additional production to be used in case
of a major market crisis.
March/April 2014 57
Conversely, oil demand is growing
sluggishly, as a consequence of the troubled
global economic situation, the slowdown in
China, India and other emerging economies,
the unsolved problems of the euro zone and
the impact of energy-efficiency legislation
across the world. Due to all these factors,
according to the International Energy
Agency world oil demand was just 91.2
mbd in 2013 on average, meaning that by
December of last year almost 8 mbd of oil
formed stocks or simply were not produced
or marketed. This imbalance is not only
big, but it’s also growing, as a consequence
of a bullish investment cycle in global
exploration and production that started
in 2003 and dramatically escalated from
2010 onward. High oil prices, the need of
most companies and countries to replace
their reserves, and the extensive application
of new technologies to oil recovery are the
major factors driving this unprecedented
spending spree that in just four years has
totaled almost $2.4 trillion in upstream
investments.
58 The National Interest
The impact of these investments on new
production capacity could be particularly
acute by 2015. In particular, if the United
States, Iraq, Canada, Brazil and Venezuela
could deploy their full oil potential,
supported by investments already under
way, global oil-production capacity could
reach 110 mbd by 2020. This evolution
could be helped by a lower decline rate
in aging oil fields, whose maturity is now
contrasted by means of either massive
redevelopment plans (such as in the case
of Iraq), or by the application of more
advanced production technology. In
addition, the world’s current production
leaders, Russia and Saudi Arabia,
are continuing to increase their
production capacity—defying the
dire predictions of most pundits,
who deemed those countries
destined to face an irreversible
decline of their oil output.
For over a decade, year after year,
most experts have been predicting
an immediate decline of Russian
output. However, the country’s
oil production has continued to
rise, and it’s now at around 10.6
mbd, with the potential to grow
more if the fiscal system is modified
to incentivize the redevelopment
of mature oil fields. As for Saudi
Arabia, the Kingdom has been a
preferred target of oil doomsters
since the 1980s, when it was
first accused of manipulating the
real extent of its oil reserves. Since then,
according to the “peak oil” theorists, the
country should have been producing less
and less. This bogus perception earned a
revival in the middle of the last decade,
when Matt Simmons’s book Twilight in
the Desert recast doubts on the Kingdom’s
effective oil potential, predicting a sudden
fall of its production. By the time of
Simmons’s book, however, Saudi Arabia
Frack to the Future
announced a plan to expand its oilproduction capacity by about 2 mbd—
or the equivalent of Brazil’s production
today—in just four years, and in late 2009
it reached its target.
Furthermore, last year the Kingdom
brought on line another big oil field,
Manifa, which in 2014 will reach its full
production at nine hundred thousand
barrels per day. Then, by 2017, Saudi
Arabia plans to add another 550,000
barrels per day by expanding the capacity
of two additional oil fields, Khurais and
Shaybah. Apparently, this expansion
should not add new net capacity to the
country’s potential, because the Kingdom’s
decision makers want to relax older
fields’ production as the fresh capacity
comes on. If this is the case, Saudi Arabia
will just preserve its current production
capacity of about 12.3 mbd (including
the output from the “neutral zone” shared
with Kuwait), the largest in the world.
As a consequence of the upward trend in
global oil production, unless a substantial
rebound of oil consumption takes place
across the world in the next few years, the
gap between global oil supply capacity and
demand will widen. This phenomenon may
not affect oil prices so long as new political
crises scare market operators and threaten
the stability of the entire Middle East.
But the basic truth remains: in the long
term, a growing imbalance between supply
capacity and consumption will turn into
a prerequisite for a collapse of oil prices.
Because the full development of shale oil
in the United States requires an oil price
higher than $80 per barrel in the short
term, and higher than $65 per barrel in the
longer term (five years), the above scenario
could have a dramatic impact on the U.S.
oil boom.
I
n order to manage the growing imbalance between supply and demand, so far
Frack to the Future
the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries (opec) has been relying on two
pillars: first, Saudi Arabia’s willingness not
to inundate the market with its full production capacity, which is obliging the Kingdom to preserve a spare capacity of at least
2.5 mbd; and second, Iran’s inability to export a sizable amount of its oil-production
potential—more than 1 mbd—due to international sanctions. In the coming years,
however, opec’s ability to manage growing
global oil supplies will continue to decline,
due to an Iraq struggling to become one of
the world’s top producers, African countries looking for new outlets for their oil,
the great potential of the United States,
Canada and other countries—and an oil
demand still stagnating due to a global
economic crisis that shows little prospect of
improvement.
What’s more, the recent interim
agreement between Iran and the group of
countries—including the United States—
that are negotiating a solution to the longdebated Iranian nuclear program is now
raising the prospect of the full return of
Iran’s oil production to the international
markets, perhaps as soon as the second half
of 2014. All these elements will likely put
opec under stress in the next few years, and
Saudi Arabia in particular. Due to its spare
capacity, the Kingdom remains the central
bank of the world’s oil market, and holds
the capability to stabilize or destabilize it.
Faced with an effective oil-production surge
from opec’s countries that hold the highest
potential to grow, namely Iraq and Iran,
and an overall rise of global oil production,
Saudi Arabia will have to consider two
opposite policy options.
On the one hand, it could opt to act
as the world’s swing producer, reducing
its output dramatically to make room for
others’ in an attempt to support oil prices,
as the Kingdom did in the early 1980s.
But if such a reduction became an endless
March/April 2014 59
retreat, the Saudi government could also
consider producing at full capacity to get
rid of more expensive oil producers and
oblige other opec members to taper their
own output, as it did in 1986. In this case,
a mild version of the 1986 oil-price collapse
could not be ruled out, and that would put
in danger both U.S. shale oil and the more
expensive Canadian oil sands. The final
result would be highly detrimental to U.S.
energy security.
This is not the only Persian Gulf scenario
that may negatively affect the United States.
Needless to say, if a major political crisis
endangers the oil production of Saudi
Arabia or another big oil producer in the
short term, oil prices would skyrocket,
no matter how much oil America could
produce. This could be good for U.S. shale
but awful for the U.S. and world economy.
60 The National Interest
These scenarios show that it would be a
mistake for the United States to confuse
notions about energy security and energy
independence and, above all, to envisage
the possibility of abandoning its historical
involvement in Persian Gulf affairs, not to
mention turning its back on Canada and
other secure oil suppliers. Whatever the
degree of energy security and independence
the United States can achieve through
the shale revolution, it will always be
inextricably linked to what happens across
the global oil market, and particularly in
the Persian Gulf. This is also true when
it comes to the evolution of its relations
with suppliers of oil such as Canada. Shale
oil may bring more energy security to the
United States, but it cannot bring energy
independence. Thinking otherwise can only
lead to a rude reawakening. n
Frack to the Future
Low-Tech Terrorism
By Bruce Hoffman
A
mong the more prescient analyses of
the terrorist threats that the United
States would face in the twenty-first century was a report published in
September 1999 by the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century,
better known as the Hart-Rudman commission. Named after its cochairs, former
senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman,
and evocatively titled New World Coming,
it correctly predicted that mass-casualty terrorism would emerge as one of America’s
preeminent security concerns in the next
century. “Already,” the report’s first page
lamented, “the traditional functions of law,
police work, and military power have begun
to blur before our eyes as new threats arise.”
It added, “Notable among these new threats
is the prospect of an attack on U.S. cities by
independent or state-supported terrorists
using weapons of mass destruction.”
Although hijacked commercial
aircraft deliberately flown into high-rise
buildings were not the weapons of mass
destruction that the commission had in
mind, the catastrophic effects that this
tactic achieved—obliterating New York
City’s World Trade Center, slicing through
several of the Pentagon’s concentric rings
and killing nearly three thousand people—
Bruce Hoffman is a contributing editor to The
National Interest, a senior fellow at the U.S.
Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center,
and a professor and director of the Center for
Security Studies at Georgetown University.
Low-Tech Terrorism
indisputably captured the gist of that
prophetic assertion.
The report was also remarkably accurate
in anticipating the terrorist organizational
structures that would come to dominate
the first dozen or so years of the new
century. “Future terrorists will probably
be even less hierarchically organized, and
yet better net-worked, than they are today.
Their diffuse nature will make them more
anonymous, yet their ability to coordinate
mass effects on a global basis will increase,”
the commission argued. Its vision of the
motivations that would animate and
subsequently fuel this violence was similarly
revelatory. “The growing resentment against
Western culture and values in some parts
of the world,” along with “the fact that
others often perceive the United States as
exercising its power with arrogance and
self-absorption,” was already “breeding a
backlash” that would both continue and
likely evolve into new and more insidious
forms, the report asserted.
Some of the commission’s other
visionary conclusions now read like a
retrospective summary of the past decade.
“The United States will be called upon
frequently to intervene militarily in a time
of uncertain alliances,” says one, while
another disconsolately warns that “even
excellent intelligence will not prevent all
surprises.” Today’s tragic events in Syria
were also anticipated by one statement
that addressed the growing likelihood
of foreign crises “replete with atrocities
March/April 2014 61
and the deliberate terrorizing of civilian
populations.”
Fortunately, the report’s most breathless
prediction concerning the likelihood of
terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction
(wmd) has not come to pass. But this is not
for want of terrorists trying to obtain such
capabilities. Indeed, prior to the October
2001 U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, Al
Qaeda had embarked upon an ambitious
quest to acquire and develop an array of
such weapons that, had it been successful,
would have altered to an unimaginable
extent our most basic conceptions about
national security and rendered moot
debates over whether terrorism posed a
potentially existential threat.
But just how effective have terrorist
efforts to acquire and use weapons of
mass destruction actually been? The
September 11, 2001, attacks were widely
noted for their reliance on relatively lowtech weaponry—the conversion, in effect,
of airplanes into missiles by using raw
physical muscle and box cutters to hijack
them. Since then, efforts to gain access to
wmd have been unceasing. But examining
those efforts results in some surprising
conclusions. While there is no cause for
complacency, they do suggest that terrorists
face some inherent constraints that will be
difficult for them to overcome. It is easier
to proclaim the threat of mass terror than to
perpetrate it.
T
he terrorist attacks on September 11
completely recast global perceptions
of threat and vulnerability. Long-standing
assumptions that terrorists were more interested in publicity than in killing were dramatically swept aside in the rising crescendo
of death and destruction. The butcher’s bill
that morning was without parallel in the
annals of modern terrorism. Throughout
the entirety of the twentieth century no
more than fourteen terrorist incidents had
62 The National Interest
killed more than a hundred people, and
until September 11 no terrorist operation
had ever killed more than five hundred
people in a single attack. Viewed from another perspective, more than twice as many
Americans perished within those excruciating 102 minutes than had been killed by
terrorists since 1968—the year widely accepted as marking the advent of modern,
international terrorism.
So massive and consequential a terrorist
onslaught naturally gave rise to fears that a
profound threshold in terrorist constraint
and lethality had been crossed. Renewed
fears and concerns were in turn generated
that terrorists would now embrace an
array of deadly nonconventional weapons
in order to inflict even greater levels of
death and destruction than had occurred
that day. Attention focused specifically
on terrorist use of wmd, and the socalled Cheney Doctrine emerged to shape
America’s national-security strategy. The
doctrine derived from former vice president
Dick Cheney’s reported statement that “if
there’s a one percent chance that Pakistani
scientists are helping Al Qaeda build or
develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat
it as a certainty in terms of our response.”
What the “one percent doctrine” meant in
practice, according to one observer, was that
“even if there’s just a one percent chance
of the unimaginable coming due, act as if
it’s a certainty.” Countering the threat of
nonconventional-weapons proliferation—
whether by rogue states arrayed in an “axis
of evil” or by terrorists who might acquire
such weapons from those same states or
otherwise develop them on their own—thus
became one of the central pillars of the
Bush administration’s time in office.
In the case of Al Qaeda, at least, these
fears were more than amply justified. That
group’s interest in acquiring a nuclear
weapon reportedly commenced as long
ago as 1992—a mere four years after its
Low-Tech Terrorism
creation. An attempt by an Al Qaeda agent
to purchase uranium from South Africa
was made either late the following year or
early in 1994 without success. Osama bin
Laden’s efforts to obtain nuclear material
nonetheless continued,
as evidenced by the
arrest in Germany in
1998 of a trusted senior
aide named Mamdouh
Mahmud Salim, who was
attempting to purchase
enriched uranium. And
that same year, the Al
Qaeda leader issued a
proclamation in the name
of the “International
Islamic Front for Fighting
the Jews and Crusaders.”
Titled “ The Nuclear
Bomb of Islam,” the
proclamation declared
that “it is the duty of Muslims to prepare
as much force as possible to terrorize the
enemies of God.” When asked several
months later by a Pakistani journalist
whether Al Qaeda was “in a position to
develop chemical weapons and try to
purchase nuclear material for weapons,” bin
Laden replied: “I would say that acquiring
weapons for the defense of Muslims is a
religious duty.”
Bin Laden’s continued interest in
nuclear weaponry was also on display at
the time of the September 11 attacks.
Two Pakistani nuclear scientists named
Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Abdul
Majeed spent three days that August at
a secret Al Qaeda facility outside Kabul.
Although their discussions with bin Laden,
his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri and other
senior Al Qaeda officials also focused on the
development and employment of chemical
and biological weapons, Mahmood—
the former director for nuclear power at
Pakistan’s Atomic Energy Commission—
Low-Tech Terrorism
claimed that bin Laden’s foremost interest
was in developing a nuclear weapon.
T h e m ov e m e n t’s e f f o r t s i n t h e
biological-warfare realm, however, were
far more advanced and appear to have
begun in earnest with a memo written
by al-Zawahiri on April 15, 1999, to
Muhammad Atef, then deputy commander
of Al Qaeda’s military committee. Citing
articles published in Science, the Journal of
Immunology and the New England Journal
of Medicine, as well as information gleaned
from authoritative books such as Tomorrow’s
Weapons, Peace or Pestilence and Chemical
Warfare, al-Zawahiri outlined in detail his
thoughts on the priority to be given to
developing a biological-weapons capability.
One of the specialists recruited for this
purpose was a U.S.-trained Malaysian
microbiologist named Yazid Sufaat. A
former captain in the Malaysian army,
Sufaat graduated from the California
State University in 1987 with a degree
in biological sciences. He later joined Al
Gamaa al-Islamiyya (the “Islamic Group”),
an Al Qaeda affiliate operating in Southeast
Asia, and worked closely with its military
operations chief, Riduan Isamuddin, better
known as Hambali, and with Hambali’s
March/April 2014 63
As mesmerizingly attractive as nonconventional weapons remain to
Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, they have mostly proven
frustratingly disappointing to whoever has tried to use them.
own Al Qaeda handler, Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed—the infamous ksm, architect
of the September 11 attacks.
In January 2000, Sufaat played host
to two of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid alMidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, who stayed
in his Kuala Lumpur condominium.
Later that year, Zacarias Moussaoui, the
alleged “twentieth hijacker,” who was
sentenced in 2006 to life imprisonment
by a federal district court in Alexandria,
Virginia, also stayed with Sufaat. Under
ksm’s direction, Hambali and Sufaat set up
shop at an Al Qaeda camp in Kandahar,
Afghanistan, where their efforts focused on
the weaponization of anthrax. Although the
two made some progress, biowarfare experts
believe that on the eve of September 11 Al
Qaeda was still at least two to three years
away from producing a sufficient quantity
of anthrax to use as a weapon.
Meanwhile, a separate team of Al
Qaeda operatives was engaged in a parallel
research-and-development project to
produce ricin and chemical-warfare agents
at the movement’s Derunta camp, near
the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad. As
one senior U.S. intelligence officer who
prefers to remain anonymous explained,
“Al Qaeda’s wmd efforts weren’t part of
a single program but rather multiple
compartmentalized projects involving
multiple scientists in multiple locations.”
The Derunta facility reportedly included
laboratories and a school that trained
handpicked terrorists in the use of chemical
and biological weapons. Among this select
group was Kamal Bourgass, an Algerian
Al Qaeda operative who was convicted in
64 The National Interest
British courts in 2004 and 2005 for the
murder of a British police officer and of
“conspiracy to commit a public nuisance
by the use of poisons or explosives.” The
school’s director was an Egyptian named
Midhat Mursi—better known by his Al
Qaeda nom de guerre, Abu Kebab—and
among its instructors were a Pakistani
microbiologist and Sufaat. When U.S.
military forces overran the camp in 2001,
evidence of the progress achieved in
developing chemical weapons as diverse as
hydrogen cyanide, chlorine and phosgene
was discovered. Mursi himself was killed in
2008 by a missile fired from a U.S. Predator
drone.
Mursi’s death dealt another significant
blow to Al Qaeda’s efforts to develop
nonconventional weapons—but it did not
end them. In fact, as the aforementioned
senior U.S. intelligence officer recently
c o m m e n t e d , “A l Qa e d a’s o n g o i n g
procurement efforts have been wellestablished for awhile now . . . They haven’t
been highlighted in the U.S. media, but
that isn’t the same as it not happening.”
In 2010, for instance, credible intelligence
surfaced that Al Qaeda in the Arabian
Pe n i n s u l a — w i d e l y c o n s i d e re d t h e
movement’s most dangerous and capable
affiliate—was deeply involved in the
development of ricin, a bioweapon made
from castor beans that the fbi has termed
the third most toxic substance known,
behind only plutonium and botulism.
Then, in May 2013, Turkish authorities
seized two kilograms of sarin nerve gas—
the same weapon used in the 1995 attack
on the Tokyo subway system—and arrested
Low-Tech Terrorism
twelve men linked to Al Qaeda’s Syrian
affiliate, Al Nusra Front. Days later, another
set of sarin-related arrests was made in
Iraq of Al Qaeda operatives based in that
country who were separately overseeing the
production of sarin and mustard blistering
agents at two or more locations.
Finally, Israel admitted in November
2013 that for the past three years it had
been holding a senior Al Qaeda operative
whose expertise was in biological warfare.
“The revelations over his alleged biological
weapons links,” one account noted of
the operative’s detention, “come amid
concerns that Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria are
attempting to procure bioweapons—and
may already have done so.”
Indeed, Syria’s ongoing civil war and the
prominent position of two key Al Qaeda
affiliates—Al Nusra Front and the Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant—along with
other sympathetic jihadi entities in that epic
struggle, coupled with the potential access
afforded to Bashar al-Assad’s chemicalweapons stockpiles, suggest that we have
likely not heard the last of Al Qaeda’s
ambitions to obtain nerve agents, poison
gas and other harmful toxins for use as
mass-casualty weapons.
N
onetheless, a fundamental paradox
appears to exist so far as terrorist capabilities involving chemical, biological and
nuclear weapons are concerned. As mesmerizingly attractive as these nonconventional
weapons remain to Al Qaeda and other
terrorist organizations, they have also mostly proven frustratingly disappointing to
whoever has tried to use them. Despite the
extensive use of poison gas during World
War I, for instance, this weapon accounted
for only 5 percent of all casualties in that
conflict. Reportedly, it required some sixty
pounds of mustard gas to produce even a
single casualty. Even in more recent times,
chemical weapons claimed the lives of less
Low-Tech Terrorism
than 1 percent (five thousand) of the six
hundred thousand Iranians who died in the
Iran-Iraq war. The Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo succeeded in killing no more than
thirteen people in its attack on the Tokyo
underground in 1995. And, five years earlier, no fatalities resulted from a Tamil Tigers
assault on a Sri Lankan armed forces base
in East Kiran that employed chlorine gas.
In fact, the wind changed and blew the gas
back into the Tigers’ lines, thus aborting the
attack.
Biological weapons have proven similarly
difficult to deploy effectively. Before and
during World War II, the Imperial Japanese
Army carried out nearly a dozen attacks
using a variety of germ agents—including
cholera, dysentery, bubonic plague, anthrax
and paratyphoid, disseminated through
both air and water—against Chinese forces.
Not once did these weapons decisively
affect the outcome of a battle. And, in the
1942 assault on Chekiang, ten thousand
Japanese soldiers themselves became ill, and
nearly two thousand died, from exposure
to these agents. “The Japanese program’s
principal defect, a problem to all efforts so
far,” the American terrorism expert David
Rapoport concluded, was “an ineffective
delivery system.”
The challenges inherent in using germs
as weapons are borne out by the research
conducted for more than a decade by
Seth Carus, a researcher at the National
Defense University. Carus has assembled
perhaps the most comprehensive database
of the use of biological agents by a wide
variety of adversaries, including terrorists,
government operatives, ordinary criminals
and the mentally unstable. His exhaustive
research reveals that no more than a total
of ten people were killed and less than a
thousand were made ill as a result of about
two hundred incidents of bioterrorism
or biocrime. Most of which, moreover,
entailed the individual poisoning of
March/April 2014 65
specific people rather than widespread,
indiscriminate attacks.
The formidable challenges of obtaining
the material needed to construct a nuclear
bomb, along with the fabrication and
dissemination difficulties involving the
use of noxious gases and biological agents,
perhaps account for the operational
conservatism long observed in terrorist
tactics and weaponry. As politically
radical or religiously fanatical as terrorists
may be, they nonetheless to date have
overwhelmingly seemed to prefer the
tactical assurance of the comparatively
modest effects achieved by the conventional
weapons with which they are familiar, as
opposed to the risk of failure inherent in
the use of more exotic means of death and
destruction. Terrorists, as Brian Jenkins
famously observed in 1985, thus continue
to “appear to be more imitative than
innovative.” Accordingly, what innovation
does occur tends to take place in the realm
66 The National Interest
of the clever adaptation or modification of
existing tactics—such as turning hijacked
passenger airliners into cruise missiles—or
in the means and methods used to fabricate
and detonate explosive devices, rather than
in the use of some new or dramatically
novel weapon.
T
errorists have thus functioned mostly
in a technological vacuum: either aloof
or averse to the profound changes that have
fundamentally altered the nature of modern
warfare. Whereas technological progress
has produced successively more complex,
lethally effective and destructively accurate
weapons systems that are deployed from a
variety of air, land, sea—and space—platforms, terrorists continue to rely, as they
have for more than a century, on the same
two basic “weapons systems”: the gun and
the bomb. Admittedly, the guns used by
terrorists today have larger ammunition capacities and more rapid rates of fire than the
simple revolver the Russian revolutionary
Vera Zasulich used in 1878 to assassinate
the governor-general of St. Petersburg. Similarly, bombs today require smaller amounts
of explosives that are exponentially more
powerful and more easily concealed than
the sticks of tnt with which the Fenian
dynamiters terrorized London more than a
century ago. But the fact remains that the
vast majority of terrorist incidents continue
to utilize the same two attack modes.
Why is this? There are perhaps two
obvious explanations: ease and cost.
Indeed, as Leonardo da Vinci is said to
have observed in a completely different era
and context, “Simplicity is the ultimate
sophistication.” The same can be said about
most terrorist—and insurgent—weapons
and tactics today.
Improvised explosive devices (ied)
and bombs constructed of commercially
available, readily accessible homemade
materials now account for the lion’s share
Low-Tech Terrorism
of terrorist—and insurgent—attacks. The
use of two crude bombs packed in ordinary
pressure cookers that killed three people
and injured nearly three hundred others at
last April’s Boston Marathon is among the
more recent cases in point. Others include
the succession of peroxide-based bombs
that featured in the July 2005 suicide
attacks on London transport, the 2006 plot
to blow up seven American and Canadian
airliners while in flight from Heathrow
Airport to various destinations in North
America, and the 2009 attempt to replicate
the London transport bombings on the
New York City subway system.
The account of the construction of the
bombs intended for the New York City
attack presented in the book Enemies
Within vividly illustrates this point. Written
by two Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists,
Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, the
book describes how the would-be bomber,
an Afghanistan-born, permanent U.S.
resident named Najibullah Zazi, easily
purchased the ingredients needed for the
device’s construction and then, following
the instructions given to him by his Al
Qaeda handlers in Pakistan, created a crude
but potentially devastatingly lethal weapon:
For weeks he’d been visiting beauty supply
stores, filling his carts with hydrogen peroxide
and nail polish remover. At the Beauty Supply
Warehouse, among the rows of wigs, braids,
and extensions, the manager knew him as Jerry.
He said his girlfriend owned hair salons. There
was no reason to doubt him.
On pharmacy shelves, in the little brown plastic
bottles, hydrogen peroxide is a disinfectant, a
sting-free way to clean scrapes. Beauty salons
use a more concentrated version to bleach hair
or activate hair dyes. At even higher concentrations, it burns the skin. It is not flammable on
its own, but when it reacts with other chemicals, it quickly releases oxygen, creating an
Low-Tech Terrorism
environment ripe for explosions. . . . Even with
a cheap stove, it’s easy to simmer water out of
hydrogen peroxide, leaving behind something
more potent. It takes time, and he had plenty
of that.
Preparing the explosive initiator was
only slightly more complicated, but
considerably more dangerous. Hence, Zazi
had to be especially careful. “He added the
muriatic acid and watched as the chemicals
crystallized,” the account continues:
The crystals are known as triacetone triperoxide, or tatp. A spark, electrical current, even a
bit of friction can set off an explosion. . . .
The white crystal compound had been popular
among Palestinian terrorists. It was cheap and
powerful, but its instability earned it the nickname “Mother of Satan”. . . .
When he was done mixing, he rinsed the crystals with baking soda and water to make his
creation more stable. He placed the finished
product in a wide-rimmed glass jar about the
size of a coffee tin and inspected his work.
There would be enough for three detonators.
Three detonators inside three backpacks filled
with a flammable mixture and ball bearings—
the same type of weapon that left 52 dead in
London in 2005. . . .
He was ready for New York.
These types of improvised weapons are
not only devastatingly effective but also
remarkably inexpensive, further accounting
for their popularity. For example, the House
of Commons Intelligence and Security
Committee, which investigated the 2005
London transport attacks, concluded that
the entire operation cost less than £8,000
to execute. This sum included the cost of a
trip to Pakistan so that the cell leader and
an accomplice could acquire the requisite
March/April 2014 67
bomb-making skills at a secret Al Qaeda
training camp in that country’s North-West
Frontier Province; the purchase of all the
needed equipment and ingredients once
they were back in Britain; the rental of an
apartment in Leeds that they turned into a
bomb factory; car rentals and the purchase
of cell phones; and other incidentals.
The cost-effectiveness of such homemade
devices—and their appeal to terrorists—is of
course not new. Decades ago, the Provisional
Irish Republican Army (pira) demonstrated
the disproportionate effects and enormous
damage that crude, inexpensive homemade
explosive devices could achieve. In what was
described as “the most powerful explosion in
London since World War II,” a pira fertilizer
bomb made with urea nitrate and diesel
fuel exploded outside the Baltic Exchange in
April 1992, killing three people, wounding
ninety others, leaving a twelve-foot-wide
crater—and causing $1.25 billion in
damage. Exactly a year later, a similar bomb
devastated the nearby Bishops Gate, killing
one person and injuring more than forty
others. Estimates put the damage of that
blast at $1.5 billion.
Long a staple of pira operations, in the
early 1990s fertilizer had cost the group
on average 1 percent of a comparable
amount of plastic explosive. Although after
adulteration fertilizer is admittedly far less
powerful than plastic explosives, it also
tends to cause more damage than plastic
explosives because the energy of the blast is
more sustained and less controlled.
Similarly, the homemade bomb used in
the first attack on New York’s World Trade
Center in 1993—consisting of urea nitrate
derived from fertilizer but enhanced by
three canisters of hydrogen gas to create
a more powerful fuel-air explosion—
produced a similarly impressive return on
the terrorists’ investment. The device cost
less than $400 to construct. Yet, it not
only killed six people, injured more than
68 The National Interest
a thousand others and gouged a 180-footwide crater six stories deep, but also caused
an estimated $550 million in damages
and lost revenue to the businesses housed
there. The seaborne suicide-bomb attack
seven years later on the uss Cole, a U.S.
Navy destroyer anchored in Aden, Yemen,
reportedly cost Al Qaeda no more than
$10,000 to execute. But, in addition to
claiming the lives of seventeen American
sailors and wounding thirty-nine others, it
cost the U.S. Navy $250 million to repair
the damage caused to the vessel.
T
his trend toward the increased use of
ieds has had its most consequential
and pernicious effects in Iraq and Afghanistan during our prolonged deployments
there. As Andrew Bacevich, a retired U.S.
Army officer and current Boston University professor, has written, “No matter how
badly battered and beaten, the ‘terrorists’”
on these and other recent battlefields were
not “intimidated, remained unrepentant,
and kept coming back for more, devising
tactics against which forces optimized for
conventional combat did not have a ready
response.” He adds, “The term invented for
this was ‘asymmetric conflict,’ loosely translated as war against adversaries who won’t
fight the way we want them to.”
In Iraq and Afghanistan, both terrorists
and insurgents alike have waged low-risk
wars of attrition against American, British,
allied and host military forces using a
variety of ieds with triggering devices as
simple as garage-door openers, cordless
phones and car key fobs to confound, if not
hobble, among the most technologically
advanced militaries in the history of
mankind. “The richest, most-trained army
got beat by dudes in manjammies and
A.K.’s,” an American soldier observed to a
New York Times reporter of one such bloody
engagement in Afghanistan five years ago.
Indeed, terrorists and insurgents in both
Low-Tech Terrorism
Terrorists continue to rely, as they have for more than a century, on
the same two basic “weapons systems”: the gun and the bomb.
Afghanistan and Iraq have demonstrated
the effectiveness of even poorly or modestly
armed nonstate adversaries in confronting
superior, conventional military forces and
waging a deadly war of attrition designed
in part to undermine popular support and
resolve back home for these prolonged
deployments. Equally worrisome, these
battle environments have become spawning
grounds for continued and future violence:
real-life training camps for jihadis and
hands-on laboratories for the research
and development of new and ever more
deadly terrorist and insurgent tactics and
techniques. “How do you stop foes who kill
with devices built for the price of a pizza?”
was the question posed by a Newsweek
cover story about ieds in 2007. “Maybe
the question is,” it continued, “can you stop
them?”
At one point, ieds were responsible
for nearly two-thirds of military fatalities
caused by terrorists and insurgents in Iraq
and a quarter of the military fatalities in
Afghanistan. According to one authoritative
account, there was an ied incident every
fifteen minutes in Iraq during 2006. And,
after the number of ied attacks had doubled
in Afghanistan during 2009, this tactic
accounted for three-quarters of military
casualties in some areas.
These explosive devices often were
constructed using either scavenged
artillery or mortar shells, with military or
commercial ordnance, or from entirely
homemade ingredients. They were then
buried beneath roadways, concealed among
roadside refuse, hidden in animal carcasses
or telephone poles, camouflaged into
Low-Tech Terrorism
curbsides or secreted along the guard rails
on the shoulders of roadways, put in boxes,
or disguised as rocks or bricks strewn by
the side of the road. As military vehicle
armor improved, the bomb makers adapted
and adjusted to these new force-protection
measures and began to design and place
ieds in elevated positions, attaching them
to road signs or trees, in order to impact the
vehicles’ unarmored upper structure.
The method of detonation has also varied
as U.S., allied and host forces have adapted
to insurgent tactics. Command-wire
detonators were replaced by radio-signal
triggering devices such as cell phones and
garage-door openers. These devices were
remote wired up to one hundred meters
from the ied detonator to obviate jamming
measures. More recently, infrared lasers have
been used as explosive initiators. One or
more artillery shells rigged with blasting
caps and improvised shrapnel (consisting
of bits of concrete, nuts, bolts, screws,
tacks, ball bearings, etc.) have been the
most commonly used, but the makeshift
devices have also gradually become larger as
multinational forces added more armor to
their vehicles, with evidence from insurgent
propaganda videos of aviation bombs of
500 lb. being used as ieds. In some cases,
these improvised devices are detonated
serially—in “daisy chain” explosions—
designed to mow down quick-reaction
forces converging on the scene following
the initial blast and first wave of casualties.
By 2011, the U.S. Defense Department
had spent nearly $20 billion on ied
countermeasures—including new
technologies, programs, and enhanced and
March/April 2014 69
constantly updated training. A “massive
new military bureaucracy” had to be created
to oversee this effort and itself was forced
to create “unconventional processes for
introducing new programs,” as a 2010 New
America Foundation report put it. Yet, as
the British Army found in its war against
Jewish terrorists in Palestine seventy years
ago, there is no easy or lasting solution
to this threat. ied attacks had in fact
become so pervasive in Palestine that in
December 1946 British Army headquarters
in Jerusalem issued
a meticulously
detailed thirty-fivepage pamphlet,
complete with
photographs and
diagrams, describing
these weapons, their
emplacement and
their lethal effects.
Even so, as military
commanders and
civilian authorities
alike acknowledged
at the time, ieds
were then as now
virtually impossible
to defend against
completely.
Perhaps the most
novel and innovative
use of ieds, however,
has been when they
have been paired with toxic chemicals.
Much as the Iraq conflict has served as a
proving ground for other terrorist weapons
and tactics, it has also served this purpose
with chemical weapons. Between 2007
and 2010, more than a dozen major truckbomb attacks occurred in Iraq involving
conventional explosions paired with
chlorine gas.
The most serious incident, however,
was one that was foiled by Jordanian
70 The National Interest
authorities in April 2004. It involved the
toxic release of chemicals into a crowded
urban environment and was orchestrated
by the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the
founder and leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
The Amman plot entailed the use of some
twenty tons of chemicals and explosives
to target simultaneously the prime
minister’s office, the General Intelligence
Department’s headquarters and the U.S.
embassy. Although the main purpose of
the coordinated operations was to conduct
forced-entry attacks
by suicide bombers
against these three
heavily protected,
high-value targets, an
ancillary intention is
believed to have been
the infliction of mass
casualties on the
surrounding areas by
the noxious chemical
agents deliberately
released in the blasts.
An estimated eighty
thousand people,
Jordanian authorities
claim, would have
been killed or
seriously injured in
the operation.
The above attacks
i n Ir a q a n d t h e
foiled incident in
Amman all underscore the potential for
terrorists to attack a domestic industrial
chemical facility with a truck bomb or other
large explosive device, with the purpose of
triggering the release of toxic chemicals. In
this respect, the effects of prior industrial
accidents involving chemicals may exert
a profound influence over terrorists.
In 2005, for instance, a train crash and
derailment in South Carolina released
some sixty tons of liquefied chlorine into
Low-Tech Terrorism
the air, killing nine people and injuring
250 others. Considerably more tragic, of
course, was the 1984 disaster at a Union
Carbide chemical facility in Bhopal, India.
Some forty tons of methyl isocyanate were
accidentally released into the environment
and killed nearly four thousand people
living around the plant. Methyl isocyanate
is one of the more toxic chemicals used in
industry, with a toxicity that is only a few
percent less than that of sarin.
T
he war on terrorism today generates
little interest and even less enthusiasm.
A decade of prolonged military deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan has drained
both the treasuries and willpower of the
United States, Great Britain and many
other countries, as well as the ardor and
commitment that attended the commencement of this global struggle over a dozen
years ago. The killings of leading Al Qaeda
Low-Tech Terrorism
figures such as bin Laden and Anwar alAwlaki—along with some forty other senior
commanders and hundreds of the group’s
fighters—have sufficiently diminished the
threat of terrorism to our war-weary, economically preoccupied nations.
But before we simply conclude that the
threat from either Al Qaeda or terrorism has
disappeared, it would be prudent to pause
and reflect on the expansive dimensions of
Al Qaeda’s wmd research-and-development
efforts—and also to consider the continuing
developments on the opposite end of
the technological spectrum that have
likewise transformed the threat against
conventionally superior militaries and even
against superpowers. Like it or not, the
war on terrorism continues, abetted by the
technological advances of our adversaries
and thus far mercifully countered by our
own technological prowess—and all the
more so by our unyielding vigilance. n
March/April 2014 71
Reviews & Essays
Max Americana
By John B. Judis
Stephen Sestanovich, Maximalist: America
in the World from Truman to Obama (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 416 pp.,
$28.95.
I
n Maximalist, Stephen Sestanovich, a
former official in the Reagan and Clinton administrations and now a professor of international relations at Columbia,
has written a history of American foreign
policy since World War II. Many of the
details are not original. Sestanovich relies
for the most part on published histories and
memoirs rather than on archival sources.
But Sestanovich tells the story well and his
interpretation of what the history means
makes the book worth considering.
Following the lead of Arthur Schlesinger
Sr., who divided American political history
into cycles of liberalism and conservatism,
Sestanovich divides the history of post–
World War II foreign policy into periods
of what he calls “maximalism” and periods
of retrenchment. It’s an old demarcation—
first voiced by Walter Lippmann and
George Kennan after World War II in a
debate over the extent to which the United
States should attempt to counter Soviet
John B. Judis is a senior editor at the New Republic
and the author of Genesis: Truman, American Jews,
and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2014).
72 The National Interest
Communism—but Sestanovich brings it up
to date and by the book’s end tips his hand
about which course he would prefer.
He doesn’t say in so many words what
maximalism and retrenchment are, but his
meaning can be gleaned from his examples.
Maximalists want to increase the military
budget; they want American power to shape
the world, with or without allied backing,
and are willing to risk war to get their way.
Maximalists, Sestanovich writes, “assumed
that international problems were highly
susceptible to the vigorous use of American
power.” Retrenchers, by contrast, believe
that America must cut back its global reach
either for budgetary reasons or because of
opposition from other powers. They preach
the limits of power. They think America
needs to pay more attention to “nation
building” at home than overseas.
Sestanovich arranges the cycles by
presidential administrations in the
following way:
Maximalists: Harry Truman (after 1946),
John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson (after
1965), Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush
(after September 11, 2001).
Retrenchers: Dwight Eisenhower, Richard
Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.
Mixed: George H. W. Bush and Bill
Clinton.
Sestanovich is critical of both maximalists
and retrenchers, but he attributes the
great successes of American foreign policy
to maximalism. “The United States
achieved a great deal precisely by being
uncompromising and confrontational,” he
writes. “Had Truman accepted a graceful
exit from Berlin, had Kennedy found a
Reviews & Essays
way to live with missiles in Cuba, had
Reagan backed away from his zero option,
the Cold War would have unfolded very
differently—and in all likelihood, not
nearly so well.”
Sestanovich sees little vir tue in
re t re n c h m e n t . “ Re t re n c h m e n t c a n
go from being seen as a strategy for
averting decline to being seen as one that
accelerates and even embraces it,” he
writes. Sestanovich uses a passive, evasive
formulation (“being seen” by whom?), but
he seems to be suggesting that the United
States is always facing new challenges
for which retrenchment invariably leaves
it unprepared—Sputnik for Eisenhower,
Soviet heavy missiles for Nixon and
Henry Kissinger, the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan for Carter and the Arab Spring
for Obama.
S
estanovich is certainly right that maximalism is responsible for notable foreign-policy successes, but he acknowledges
that it is also responsible for our greatest
failures, which brought forth periods of
retrenchment. Truman’s abortive attempt
to unify the Korean Peninsula, which precipitated a Chinese invasion, led to Eisenhower’s retrenchment; Johnson’s escalation
of the Vietnam War led to Nixon’s retrenchment; and George W. Bush’s invasion of
Iraq led to Obama’s retrenchment. The
United States is still reeling from Bush’s decision to invade Iraq.
But Sestanovich blames these failures
on what amount to correctable errors.
The Truman administration screwed up
in Korea because of overreach. Having
Reviews & Essays
driven the North Koreans out of the
South, Truman and Secretary of State
Dean Acheson, discounting the Chinese
threat, became determined to unify the
peninsula. Sestanovich suggests that if
General Douglas MacArthur, the American
commander, had pulled his forces back
from the Chinese border at the first inkling
of China’s intervention, the United States
could have held most of North Korea
against the Chinese.
Likewise, Sestanovich says that in
Vietnam, Johnson should have accepted the
advice in 1966 of General Victor Krulak to
limit troop involvement in the South while
escalating the air war in the North. And in
Iraq after the 2003 invasion, he argues, the
U.S. strategy became hostage to Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s rejection of
nation building. “This early mishandling of
the occupation,” Sestanovich writes, “had a
lasting impact on U.S. policy.”
But in most of these cases, Washington’s
strategy was probably irredeemable. The
Chinese still could have created a stalemate
in Korea. During the Vietnam War,
Krulak’s advice to Johnson anticipated what
would become Richard Nixon’s strategy of
escalation in the North and Vietnamization
in the South. At best, following this advice
would have let Johnson achieve the kind
of agreement that Nixon later signed with
the North Vietnamese. But it certainly
would not have prevented the fall of South
Vietnam. In Iraq, a larger occupation
force and a more sophisticated occupation
strategy might at best have delayed the
onset of the anti-American rebellion and
the civil war between Sunni and Shia
March/April 2014 73
forces. The lesson I would draw is that
maximalism and retrenchment succeed or
fail depending upon the circumstances in
which they are pursued. The real difference
is in the circumstances.
If you look at the different successes and
failures, Sestanovich’s instances of success
came from America facing down the Soviet
Union, and his failures from America
attempting to impose its will on nations
that had been the victims of European,
American and Japanese colonialism. In the
latter situations, the United States ended
up replicating the strategy and assumptions
of an imperial power, and it encountered
a resistance that was based on a centuryold nationalism, even if sometimes, as in
Latin America or Asia, it came under the
banner of Communism. The United States
failed in Vietnam as the French had earlier,
and it encountered the same resistance in
Iraq that the British had faced after World
War I. These failures didn’t have to do with
specific tactics, but with an unwillingness
to accept basic facts about what came to
74 The National Interest
be called the North-South conflict. Two
world wars had been fought over the
spoils of empire. Woodrow Wilson and
Vladimir Lenin had already endorsed selfdetermination for the colonized, and new
anti-imperial movements and leaders had
emerged that brooked no compromise.
Take Sestanovich’s portrayal of John
Kennedy as the arch maximalist. “John
Kennedy and his team were probably the
most activist group ever put in charge
of American foreign policy,” he writes.
Kennedy and his foreign-policy advisers
became reluctant to act, however, because
they had difficulty making decisions. “They
were exceedingly indecisive managers of
policy, given to protracted and inconclusive
deliberation,” he writes. But where Kennedy
most exhibited indecision was in choosing
whether, and to what degree, to intervene
in Southeast Asia, and that wasn’t just a
product of being indecisive, but also of the
special circumstances of the region.
Sestanovich depicts Kennedy as eager
to intervene in Vietnam, quoting him as
saying that the Roman Empire’s “success
was dependent on their will and ability
to fight successfully at the edges of their
empire.” But he recounts how Kennedy was
undecided about how to wage the fight.
That may have been because Kennedy
understood that he was getting into a
situation that didn’t call for activism.
In Lessons in Disaster, an excellent study
of the Kennedy era based on the papers of
McGeorge Bundy, the president’s nationalsecurity adviser, Gordon M. Goldstein
attributes Kennedy’s reluctance to escalate
American participation in the Vietnam War
Reviews & Essays
to his understanding of colonialism and
nationalism:
Kennedy had visited Vietnam as a congressman
in 1951 when 250,000 French troops, aided by
200,000 pro-French Vietnamese, were fighting the Vietnamese Communist forces. From
the French defeat, he drew the lesson that if
the United States were to send troops, and not
merely attempt to advise and train the South
Vietnamese regime, it would turn what had
been a civil war against a Communist insurgency into a struggle between the U.S. and a
colonized people struggling for independence.
The U.S., like France, would be bound to lose
this kind of war. It wouldn’t be fighting communism, but nationalism.
Goldstein also writes that Kennedy told
his aides that if he were reelected in 1964,
he would withdraw from Vietnam. In this
respect, as in his accepting a neutral Laos,
Kennedy may not have been such a maximalist after all.
The jury is still out on what Kennedy
would have done, and whether he really
understood the perils of a neoimperial
strategy in Southeast Asia, but there is no
question that Lyndon Johnson did not.
Johnson and his advisers saw nationalism
and anticolonialism through the prism
of the Cold War struggle against Soviet
Communism. Other presidents also failed
to distinguish East-West from NorthSouth conflicts. Truman and Acheson
were under enormous political pressure
from Republicans charging that they had
“lost” China, but still they seem to have
accepted the false premise of this charge—
Reviews & Essays
that the loss of the former victim of
European and Japanese colonialism was
tantamount to a defeat in a worldwide
struggle against Soviet Communism. In
1950, they dismissed a British suggestion
that they distinguish Chinese from Soviet
Communism. Johnson, Nixon and Reagan
didn’t understand anti-imperialism in Latin
America or the Middle East, and George
W. Bush and his neoconservative and liberal
boosters certainly didn’t understand Iraq.
Those failures, more than any commitment
to maximalism or retrenchment, doomed
the foreign policy of these presidents.
S
ome presidents did make the appropriate distinctions in relation to some
countries. Nixon and Kissinger realized—
after almost fifteen years of open Sino-Soviet conflict—that China was not a dependable part of the Soviet empire, and George
H. W. Bush understood that America’s motives in the Gulf War had to be limited to
ousting Iraq from Kuwait. These American
presidents understood that if the United
States didn’t want to incur a nationalist
backlash, it would have to make clear that
its aims were limited.
One way to do this—going back to
Wilson’s attempt to dismantle imperialism
in 1919—has been for great powers to act
through international organizations when
intervening in other countries. George H.
W. Bush understood the need for collective
action in the Gulf War. Five years before his
son invaded Iraq, Bush wrote:
I firmly believed that we should not march into
Baghdad. . . . To occupy Iraq would instantly
March/April 2014 75
Sestanovich is right in saying that a policy of retrenchment
can lead to failure. But the history of retrenchment, like that
of maximalism, is studded with successes as well as failures.
shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab
world against us, and make a broken tyrant
into a latter-day Arab hero . . . assigning young
soldiers . . . to fight in what would be an unwinnable urban guerrilla war.
Bill Clinton also understood the
importance of collective action. That’s
why he insisted on acting through nato
in the Balkans. If the United States had
acted alone, it could have sparked a war of
national liberation that might still be going
on. (The British military historian Michael
Howard is said to have remarked during the
2003 Iraq War that it was fortunate that the
United States had lost the Vietnam War,
because if it hadn’t, it might still be there.)
Sestanovich, on the other hand, points
with favor to Acheson’s skepticism
about the United Nations and Reagan’s
dissatisfaction with his European allies.
And he misunderstands George H. W.
Bush’s commitment to collective security.
He writes that Bush “managed to mobilize
a global coalition without really limiting
American freedom of action.” But in fact,
Bush’s collective commitment did limit
American action—and greatly to America’s
benefit. When America has abandoned this
strategy for some version of unilateralism,
as Johnson did in Vietnam or George W.
Bush did in Iraq (where Washington’s only
significant ally was the former imperial
power in the region), the United States has
provoked a nationalist backlash. Erstwhile
villains have been turned into martyrs.
And American forces, hopeful to be seen
as “liberators,” have become seen instead as
imperialists.
76 The National Interest
Sestanovich is right, of course, in
saying that a policy of retrenchment can
lead to failure. Carter’s attempts to reach
accords with the Soviet Union may have
convinced Moscow that it could meddle
in Africa without repercussions. In his
first two years, Clinton’s attempt to steer
clear of international conflict contributed
to massacres in Bosnia and Rwanda that
probably could have been avoided with a
minimal show of American determination.
But the history of retrenchment, like that
of maximalism, is studded with successes as
well as failures. Eisenhower’s winding down
of the Korean War, Nixon’s opening to
China and his closing of the gold window,
Reagan’s belated decision in his second term
to wind down American intervention in
Central America and George H. W. Bush’s
decision not to invade Iraq have to be
counted as successes that were based upon a
recognition of the limits of American power.
W
hat I would conclude from this
mix of successes and failures is that
the difference between maximalism and
retrenchment is not the most telling way
to divide the history of American foreign
policy since World War II. American policy makers have debated what to do along
these lines, but the debate has often been
muddled. The debate between Kennan and
Lippmann over how to respond to the Soviet threat—with Kennan initially prescribing
aggressive “counterforce” around the globe,
which Lippmann considered entirely unnecessary and dangerous—was really about
Soviet intentions. Lippmann and his successors did worry about America turning into
Reviews & Essays
a militarized society,
but they would not
have expressed these
concerns if they
didn’t disagree with
the prevailing “maximalist” view of the
kind of threat that
the Soviet Union,
Communist China,
a Communist Vietnam or Saddam
Hussein’s Iraq posed.
It is also hard to
draw a sharp line
between administrations that practiced
maximalism and those that practiced
retrenchment. Sestanovich concedes
that George H. W. Bush’s and Clinton’s
administrations represented a mix of the
two approaches, but that is also true of
many other administrations as well.
Kennedy stared down the Russians during
the Cuban missile crisis, but afterward
signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty; he
also agreed to a neutralized Laos. Nixon,
the retrencher, tried to secure a graceful
exit from Vietnam, but he attempted to
do so initially by winning the war—a
strategy that Sestanovich himself describes
as “maximalist.” Reagan is Sestanovich’s
archetypical maximalist, but his courting
of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and
his advocacy of nuclear abolitionism can
be construed as retrenchment as well as
maximalism. His withdrawal of support
for the contras in Nicaragua—which the
conservative advocates of maximalism
loudly denounced—could also certainly be
Reviews & Essays
interpreted as an act
of retrenchment.
What Sestanovich
seems to have
done is to project
the difference he
sees in America’s
approaches to the
Soviet Union,
typified by the
difference between
Carter before 1979
and Reagan, onto
the entire history
of foreign policy
since World War II. He also seems to have
endorsed the neoconservative excuse (it’s
all Rumsfeld’s fault) for the failure of the
George W. Bush administration’s invasion
of Iraq, as well as the neoconservative
critique of George H. W. Bush for not
going to Baghdad and provoking a decadelong guerrilla war. That leads Sestanovich—
without saying so in so many words—to
mount a one-sided defense of “muscular”
and sometimes unilateral foreign-policy
initiatives and to reject policies that suggest
the limits of American power. That’s not
helpful, particularly in guiding foreign
policy now.
Sestanovich sees Barack Obama as an
advocate of retrenchment. That’s certainly
true in some respects. Obama has had to
dig America out of the hole in the Middle
East that George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq
created. He has had to govern on behalf of
an American public skeptical about the use
of American force overseas except in obvious
cases of self-defense. And he has had to
March/April 2014 77
face Republican opposition to government
spending, including military spending.
These factors certainly reinforced Obama’s
decision to withdraw from Iraq and to limit
America’s intervention in the Arab Spring,
most recently in Syria’s civil war.
But Obama, like his predecessors, has
also been faced with having to come to
terms with situations in Iraq, Iran, Egypt,
Syria, Afghanistan and Israel/Palestine, as
well as in China/Taiwan and North Korea,
where the scars from the long history of
Western and Japanese colonialism are still
visible. Sestanovich is critical of Obama for
undermining the effort at nation building
in Afghanistan by setting a deadline for
withdrawal, but Obama’s real mistake
may have been in listening too closely to
the advocates of counterinsurgency (the
heirs of Maxwell Taylor in Vietnam) who
wanted him to commit the United States
to long-term intervention. And Obama’s
greatest success may come in defying the
neoconservatives and America’s Israel lobby
by extending a hand to Iran’s rulers.
Is Obama in these cases “retrenching,”
or is he displaying a better understanding
of the conflicts that have divided the
world for a century? Sestanovich wants to
see American foreign policy in the light of
cycles of retrenchment and maximalism;
I prefer to see it as two long twilight
struggles—one to wage the Cold War and
the other to come to terms with the turmoil
unleashed by the age of imperialism and
nationalism. The United States has won the
Cold War, but in the Middle East, Africa,
South Asia and the Far East the other
struggle is far from over. n
78 The National Interest
The Enigma
of Mr. X
By Christian Caryl
George F. Kennan, ed. Frank Costigliola,
The Kennan Diaries (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014), 768 pp., $39.95.
A
friend recently described me in an
email as “irascible.” She meant it
in an offhanded, affectionate sort
of way—but I have to admit that her choice
of adjective gave me a chill. Could it be
that, unnoticed to myself, I had slipped
into the ranks of the most tiresome group
of people in the United States? I refer, of
course, to the Grumpy Old White Guys.
You know the type. They’re the ones who
corner you at a party to complain about the
use of Spanish in official announcements
on the bus, or cut you off in the supermarket parking lot to compensate for early
retirement-induced rage. Their public mascot is John McCain, that walking tantrumin-waiting—but that doesn’t mean that all
of them are conservative. To the contrary:
you can also find plenty of crabby old liberals out there, griping about the collapse
of manufacturing or the hopeless egotism
of today’s materialist youth. (I’m actually
pretty sure that cantankerous boomers rep-
Christian Caryl is a senior fellow at the Legatum
Institute in London and a contributing editor at
The National Interest and Foreign Policy.
Reviews & Essays
resent a core demographic for Rolling Stone
and the New Yorker.) It’s gotten to the point
where I automatically steer a wide berth
around any portly, bearded over-sixty wearing glasses on a lanyard.
I’ve tended to think of this as a strictly
contemporary phenomenon, along with
Duck Dynasty, retiree Pilates and websites
for Christian singles. How wrong I was.
It turns out that the Grumpy Old White
Guys actually have a venerable and quite
august pedigree—and among them was one
of the most influential American foreignpolicy thinkers of the twentieth century. I
speak of George F. Kennan (1904–2005),
the man who provided the intellectual
underpinnings of the Cold War concept of
containment, who served as the first head
of the State Department’s Policy Planning
Staff, and who made vital contributions to
the Marshall Plan as well as the design of
overall U.S. strategy toward Europe and
the Far East in the wake of World War II.
He met with everyone from Joseph Stalin
to Mikhail Gorbachev, from Harry Truman
to Ronald Reagan. George H. W. Bush
awarded him the Presidential Medal of
Freedom. His friend Charles Bohlen, who
served as ambassador to Moscow, wrote a
fine memoir called Witness to History. But
Kennan was truly it.
Few American public-policy intellectuals
have been comparably lionized during their
lifetimes. But Kennan deserved it. There
weren’t many in Washington who could
compete with his remarkable breadth of
learning and experience, which included
flawless knowledge of multiple languages,
a deep immersion in the life of Central
Reviews & Essays
and Eastern Europe, and a silky and ironic
prose style, modeled partly on Edward
Gibbon, that reflected his intense, private
engagement with the great Russian writers.
He was a rara avis in Washington, a
deeply cultured man who had an intuitive
understanding of the European civilization
that disappeared in August 1914. He
never ceased mourning its disappearance,
dedicating his last books to analyzing the
diplomatic machinations of Germany,
France and Russia preceding the plunge
into the abyss.
U
pon his graduation from Princeton
University in 1925, where he never
quite fit in, Kennan entered the State Department, where he was posted to Riga,
Latvia. There he learned Russian and absorbed anti-Communist precepts. He never
had any illusions about the thugs that surrounded Stalin, and he served as an aide to
the first American ambassador to the Soviet
Union, William Bullitt, who entered his
post sympathetic to Soviet aspirations only
to become a virulent anti-Communist after
witnessing the depredations of Stalinism.
Kennan went on to serve in posts in Berlin
and Prague, where he saw the Nazi dictatorship firsthand. It would be difficult to think
of anyone who had a clearer understanding
of totalitarianism in the past century. Kennan may have been somewhat maladroit
as a diplomat—he was banished from the
Soviet Union as ambassador after World
War II for making the true but impolitic
observation that the Soviet Union’s methods
reminded him of those of the Nazis—but
he was a remarkably clear-eyed observer.
March/April 2014 79
Indeed, it was his deftness as a writer that
helped to magnify the impact of both his
“Long Telegram” of February 1946, which
warned about malign Soviet intentions and
arrived like a thunderbolt in official Washington, and his July 1947 Foreign Affairs
article “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,”
which, appearing under the pseudonym
of Mr. X, posited that “the main element
of any United States
policy toward the Soviet Union must be
that of a long-term,
patient but firm and
vigilant containment
of Russian expansive
tendencies.” It neatly
summarized the future of Cold War
strategy, setting up
a lifelong, agonized
confrontation between Kennan himself and the policy
that he had helped to
birth. A national-security state, which engorged itself on massive budgets and perpetual enemies, had
emerged, and Kennan viewed it as wholly
inimical to true American republican traditions, a trend that was confirmed once
neoconservative triumphalism about the
end of the Cold War morphed into a global
crusade to crush America’s real and imagined foes.
Despite his obvious intellectual integrity,
Kennan retired from the State Department
80 The National Interest
at the age of forty-nine—if “retired” is really
the right word to use. (He was actually frogmarched to the exit by the baleful John
Foster Dulles after Kennan dared, in one
of his public talks, to repudiate the idea
of the rollback of Communism in Eastern
Europe as “replete with possibilities for
misunderstanding and bitterness.”) The
author of containment soon ended up at the
Institute for Advanced
Study at his alma
mater of Princeton.
There, he cemented
his reputation by
churning out a string
of histories, memoirs
and analyses that
b ro u g h t h i m t w o
National Book Awards
a n d t w o Pu l i t z e r
Prizes (as well as an
Einstein Peace Prize,
in recognition for his
passionate opposition
to the Vietnam War
and the nuclear-age
balance of terror). It
quickly became clear
that Kennan was the
supreme realist, almost
always skeptical of America’s intentions and
ability to effect beneficent change abroad. In
1957, when he delivered the Reith Lectures
at Oxford, he caused an international stir
by advocating that the West work toward a
neutral and unified Germany. He wanted
cooperation, not confrontation, with
Moscow. He was denounced by Dean
Acheson as espousing delusional pacifist
Reviews & Essays
Kennan was the wisest of the wise men, a
profound thinker who had a tragic sense of history,
particularly in the atomic age, that his coevals lacked.
views. But Kennan was the wisest of the wise
men, a profound thinker who had a tragic
sense of history, particularly in the atomic
age, that his coevals lacked. He despised the
assumption, still embarrassingly common
among American politicians, that all you
need to get a foreign leader to come around
to Washington’s position is a bit of personal
quality time (just think of Clinton’s sauna
sessions with Boris Yeltsin or George W.
Bush’s notorious soul gazing with Vladimir
Putin). Kennan believed that foreign policy
should be based on a sober assessment of
national interest, not on the caprices of
personality or temporary political advantage.
At a moment when much of the foreignpolicy establishment was championing war
with Iraq in 2002, Kennan, at the age of
ninety-eight, vigorously decried the notion
that it would end in anything but disaster.
“Today, if we went into Iraq, like the
president would like us to do, you know
where you begin,” he said. “You never know
where you are going to end.” He was right.
All his life he liked to quote Gibbon’s passage
in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
about the “unnatural task of holding in
submission distant peoples.” Not until 2005,
when he died at the age of 101, was his
perspicuous voice stilled.
T
hat was the public Kennan. But it
turns out that there’s a lot more to
the story. The man who reveals himself in
The Kennan Diaries is a compulsive grouser,
relentlessly downbeat about his personal
prospects as well as those of his country, tormented by his nagging attraction to women
not his wife, plagued by intense loneliness,
Reviews & Essays
bedeviled by a sense of his own inadequacy
and grimly obsessed with the extent of his
clout. He was an unapologetic reactionary.
It was his neighbor J. Richardson Dilworth
who put his finger on Kennan’s personality:
“George is ultra-conservative. He’s almost
a monarchist.” Kennan was the ultimate
realist about the country that he alternately
loved and loathed. Like Henry Adams, with
whom he had much in common, he never
fully trusted it. He viewed democracy itself
with profound misgivings, contemptuous
of gusts of public opinion, embodied in the
Red Scare and the rise of McCarthyism, that
could buffet foreign affairs and prevent elites
from calmly steering the ship of state. Like
Acheson, he viewed apartheid South Africa
with indulgence and the lower orders with
mistrust.
To be sure, we’ve caught glimpses of this
Kennan over the years—like this brief bit of
1952 self-analysis in the second volume of
his memoirs, where he berates himself for
his abortive stint as ambassador to the ussr:
I was probably too highly strung emotionally, too imaginative, too sensitive, and too
impressed with the importance of my own
opinions, to sit quietly on that particular seat.
For this, one needed a certain phlegm, a certain
contentment with the trivia of diplomatic life,
a readiness to go along uncomplainingly with
the conventional thinking of Washington, and
a willingness to refrain from asking unnecessary questions—none of which I possessed in
adequate degree.
Though Kennan’s contempt for his peers
comes through loud and clear, this is still
March/April 2014 81
relatively restrained. When it was a matter
of public consumption he knew how to
keep his demons in check. To be sure, it was
widely understood around the Washington
of Kennan’s day that he was—how shall we
put it?—a bit of an eccentric. Yet he also
managed to eke out a pretty spectacular
career over two decades in the State
Department, one of Washington’s most
staid bureaucracies, and his subsequent
triumphs in the academic stratosphere at
Princeton suggest that he knew how to
maintain his place in the establishment.
Throughout his career his desperate urge
to wield influence seems to have held him
back from expressing his most outré views
in public. The major exception, perhaps,
was his 1993 book Around The Cragged
Hill: A Personal And Political Philosophy, in
which, among other things, he proposed
dividing the United States into twelve
more manageable minirepublics. But by
then he was eighty-nine, and could afford
to indulge his inner curmudgeon without
much fear of the consequences.
Even so, these newly published diaries—
actually a smoothly edited sliver of the
twenty-two thousand pages he produced
during eighty-eight years of writing—still
come as something of a shock. Kennan
wasn’t just a Grumpy Old White Guy
avant la lettre; he was already deep into the
role just a few years after graduating from
college. Here he is at age twenty-four:
The Americanization of Europe, the flooding
of the continent with the cultural as well as the
economic goods of the New World: all this is
something which Europe owes to its own im-
82 The National Interest
perfection. Americanism, like Bolshevism, is a
disease which gains footing only in a weakened
body. I have lost my sympathy for the Europeans who protest against the influx of American
automobiles and American phonograph records. If the Old World has no longer sufficient
vitality, economic and cultural, to oppose these
new barbarian invasions, it will have to drown
in the flood, as civilizations have drowned before it.
He was nothing if not consistent; his
views changed little throughout the eightyeight years that he devoted to his diaries.
They are rife with ruminations about the
horrors of unbridled democracy, vulgarian
culture and deracination. In 1930, he
wonders whether a fascist party could
ever arise in the United States. Probably
not, he concludes: “Somehow, I just can’t
conjure up an image of the American who
is prepared to put the public good before
their personal lives, including love and
society.” Or take this characteristic entry
from 1977: “A lost people, we wasps, living
out our lives, like displaced people, in a
cultural diaspora, unrelieved even by any
consciousness of the existence, albeit far
away, of a lost homeland.” A 1969 visit to
the National Portrait Gallery in London
prompts him to express his astonishment
that
the obvious erosion of the genes, brought about
over this past century by the effect of modern
hygiene in keeping alive the weak, should be so
central a fact of our time, and yet never talked
about, as though contemporary Western humanity were afraid of insulting itself.
Reviews & Essays
A 1978 trip to California inspires a
soliloquy about how the intermingling of
the state’s various regional groups inevitably
leads to a “vast polyglot mass, . . . one
huge pool of indistinguishable mediocrity
and drabness. Exceptions may be only the
Jews and the Chinese, who tend to avoid
intermarriage, and, for a time, the Negroes
and hatred of the whites.” It’s tempting to
dismiss this sort of lazy bigotry as a product
of Kennan’s times; such views were, after
all, quite common among white Americans
born in the early years of the century.
(Kennan’s biographer, the admirable John
Lewis Gaddis, makes just this plea for
clemency in his book.) But the thought
does not entirely console.
S
as well.” This could mean, Kennan reflects,
that these three groups would ultimately
subjugate the rest of the populace to their
will—“the Chinese by their combination
of intelligence, ruthlessness, and ant-like
industriousness; the Jews by their sheer
determination to survive as a culture; the
Negroes by their ineradicable bitterness
Reviews & Essays
ome of his crankiest observations deal
with the shortcomings of democracy.
During his time as a government official
Kennan had often witnessed how the principles of good policy were undermined by
the short-term thinking of elected politicians, and he had concluded from the experience that democracies were inherently
incapable of devising and pursuing rational
strategy. On some deeper level, the whole
notion of popular rule simply rankled. In a
1984 diary entry, he sketches out his ideal
vision of the United States. Plank number
one: a national military “directed strictly to
the defense of our own soil,” including an
army “based on universal national service
along Swiss lines.” This is followed by a set
of policies for population control: “Men
having spawned more than 2 children will
be compulsively sterilized. Planned parenthood and voluntary sterilization will be
in every way encouraged.” His economic
model is based on a comprehensive rejection of all forms of computerization
and mechanization: “Everything possible
will be done to re-primitivize and localize the economic process: encouragement
of the handicrafts, restriction of elaborate
processing, break-up of the national dis-
March/April 2014 83
The man who reveals himself in The Kennan Diaries
is a compulsive grouser, relentlessly downbeat about
his personal prospects as well as those of his country.
tribution chains, maximum development
of local resources, & local distribution.”
Public transportation is to be actively encouraged, the use of cars and airplanes restricted to cases of hardship or emergency.
In agriculture he favors government support of the “small family farm” (aided by
dramatic reductions in the use of artificial
fertilizers as a means of restoring the soil).
He then concludes:
Well, enough of this nonsense. The question
at once arises: could any of this, even if desirable, be done other than by the most ferocious
dictatorship? The answer is obviously: no. It
could never be done by popular consent. The
“people” haven’t the faintest idea what is good
for them.
There can be little doubt that Kennan
was quite sincere in these opinions. They’re
simply too frequent, and too zealously
expressed, to conclude otherwise. So is it
time for us to topple him from the policy
Olympus, to dismiss him as a simple
lunatic? Do his ugliest or most bizarre
beliefs invalidate his worth as a strategist
and historian?
I think there are several reasons why the
answer must be no. First, there’s the simple
fact that these are diaries, not documents
for public consumption. Frank Costigliola,
who edited the present volume, notes that
Kennan’s diary entries tended to thin out
when he was in the most productive phases
of his career, and especially at the end of
the 1940s, when he was at the peak of his
influence in Washington. Kennan sought
recourse to diary writing above all when
84 The National Interest
he was at his most depressed, Costigliola
writes. These diaries are the exercise ground
of Kennan’s id, the one realm where he
could allow himself to vent, to meditate,
to express his darkest fears—all of it with
the greatest candor. Kennan did make some
of the diaries available to trusted historians
while he was still alive, of course, and I’m
sure he expected them to be presented
to the general public after his death—
but he certainly didn’t intend for them
to be treated like his memoirs. So even if
the diaries can help us to illuminate the
wellsprings of Kennan’s thinking, we still
need to be careful to balance their content
with the polished products of the man’s
mind and to situate his ideas in the broader
context of an impossibly complicated and
eventful life. Indeed, there’s a distinctly
unfinished quality to the diaries since
they often glide over the most important
moments in Kennan’s life and career while
dwelling at great length over marginal
events and momentary impressions—a
pattern entirely in keeping with the
notion of the journals as an intellectual
sketchbook.
Yet illuminate the wellsprings they
do—and Costigliola is quite right to see
depression as one of the keys. The editor
isn’t kidding when he suggests that Kennan
kept his diary as a way of responding to
onslaughts of melancholy. Pretty much
anything can set the man off: a bad dream,
sound films, a perceived slight, a passing
glimpse of an attractive woman. Political
events are a frequent trigger. Here’s Kennan
in 1956 after Dwight D. Eisenhower
announced his intention to seek a second
Reviews & Essays
term as president: “There can be, for
me, only one refuge: learn, at long last,
the art of silence, of the commonplace, of
humor, anything but serious discussion.”
Needless to say, Kennan followed this
remark with another forty-nine years of
speaking engagements, book writing
and polemicizing. He frets when he isn’t
working enough, and whines when he’s too
busy. In 1968, he muses:
The extreme unhappiness with which I confront the prospect of returning home arises not
just from the hopeless profusion of my obligations and involvements there, but also from
awareness of my own personal failings & the
lack of success I have had in overcoming them.
My congenital immaturity of bearing and conduct, my garrulousness, the difficulty I find
rejecting hard liquor when it is offered to me as
a part of hospitality, the uncontrollable wandering eye—all these things are unworthy of the
rest of me, & they limit what I could make out
of myself and what I could contribute in these
final years of active life.
Despising his own era, he wishes that
he’d been born in a different century. He
ponders the sad mystery of his mother,
whom he never knew because she died
shortly after his birth. He endures nervous
breakdowns, ulcers and shingles. (The
index of the book offers seven references to
“Kennan, George Frost, intestinal problems
of.”) Whenever Kennan was confronted
with a serious problem, as Gaddis notes in
his biography, he would suffer some sort of
breakdown that would allow him to enter
a hospital and be cosseted by sympathetic
Reviews & Essays
nurses who perhaps served as the surrogate
mother he never met. (This isn’t just
psychoanalytical license on Gaddis’s part—
Kennan himself often considered the
possibility that his longings for the opposite
sex had a great deal to do with the big
hole in his life where his mother should
have been.) He struggles with financial
straits and the myriad complications
of a fantastically peripatetic life (despite
his contempt for modern transportation,
particularly the automobile). Flashes of
titanic arrogance alternate with spurts of
virulent self-loathing. As Kennan himself
recognized in that remark about his lack of
“phlegm,” his was not a personality entirely
suited to the harsh give-and-take of highlevel politics. Isaiah Berlin, the British
philosopher who did a stint as a diplomat at
his country’s Moscow embassy in the 1940s,
once said of his friend Kennan: “He doesn’t
bend. He breaks.”
Y
et these character traits can’t be seen
in isolation from the rest of the package. Kennan’s great virtue as an analyst was
his ability to see things from the outside.
No one was better at tracing out the logical implications of a particular policy in all
their elaborate permutations (even if, in so
doing, he often ended up overlooking the
grubbier but no less important aspects of
everyday politics). And this was not despite
but because of his own proudly cultivated
sense of alienation, his persistent suspicion
that he’d been born into the wrong era, or
that, above all, he was really a Russian at
heart. In a famous interview with George
Urban in Encounter, for example, Kennan
March/April 2014 85
melancholy reality, than at other times. It was,
in other words, not the depression which was
abnormal, but the irrational hopefulness, which
prevailed at other times.
praised the Soviet Union for its ability to
control pornography and expatiated upon
his horror at seeing a recent Danish youth
festival that was “swarming with hippies—
motorbikes, girlfriends, drugs, pornography, drunkenness, noise—it was all there.
I looked at this mob and thought how one
company of robust Russian infantry would
drive it out of town.” (An early draft of this
sentiment can be found here in the diaries.)
The notion of “depressive realism,” which
argues that sadder people are often better
at judging situations for what they really
are, has become quite popular these days.
(Just think of books like Nassir Ghaemi’s
A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links
Between Leadership and Mental Illness and
Joshua Wolf Shenk’s Lincoln’s Melancholy.)
But Kennan was already writing about it
(referring to himself in the third person) in
his diary in 1942, describing
the conviction that when in a depression he
was nearer to reality, to a certain tragic and
86 The National Interest
I think he’s on to something here (even if
I’m a bit reluctant to fetishize the insight).
For whatever reasons, Kennan certainly
had a remarkable ability to step outside of
himself and envision alternate realities. I
was particularly moved by a moment in the
diaries in 1949 when he contemplates the
ruins of Hamburg, a city he had lived in
before the war and which was obliterated
by several days of Allied firebomb air raids.
Kennan, who had a complete command of
German, is anguished by the destruction
of the noble Hanseatic city. He suddenly
feels “an unshakeable conviction that no
momentary military advantage . . . could
have justified this stupendous, careless
destruction of civilian life and of material
values, built up laboriously by human
hands, over the course of centuries.” And
then this:
And it suddenly appeared to me that in these
ruins there was an unanswerable symbolism
which we in the West could not afford to ignore. If the Western world was really going
to make valid the pretense of a higher moral
departure point—of greater sympathy and
understanding for the human being as God
made him, as expressed not only in himself,
but in the things he has wrought and has cared
about—then it had to learn to fight its wars
morally as well as militarily, or not fight them
at all; for moral principles were a part of its
strength.
Reviews & Essays
This critique of the military and moral
rationale of the Allied bombing campaign
during the war has, over the past decade
or so, come into its own—not least, I’m
sure, thanks to the comfortable historical
distance that has opened up between us
and those who actually planned and
implemented the destruction. Yet one
wonders how many U.S. government
officials during the 1940s would have been
able to behold the fruits of the policy with
the sort of critical distance that Kennan
demonstrates. His black, razor-sharp
diagnosis of Stalinism—at a time when proSoviet wartime propaganda in the United
States presented a diametrically opposed
picture of the regime—is of a piece with
this innate skepticism and independence
of thought. He viewed the mendacious
pro-Soviet ambassador to Moscow, Joseph
Davies, who hailed the show trials and
Stalin, with undisguised contempt and
revulsion. As his diaries demonstrate, not
everything that he concluded was fruitful
or wise or perspicacious—and I have to
confess that some of the things I learned
about the man from this book did diminish
his image in my eyes. But I would still insist
that it was precisely Kennan’s ability to ask
big questions, and his gift for transforming
his insights into powerful prose, that made
him so unique. Has today’s Washington
become more or less inviting to talents of
his stature? I’m not entirely sure, though the
Kennan chair has yet to be filled and may
well remain empty. What I do know is that
we condemn him, and those like him, at
our own risk. A dose of grumpiness in the
right place can work wonders. n
Reviews & Essays
Revisiting Zionism
By Bernard Wasserstein
John B. Judis, Genesis: Truman, American
Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2014), 448 pp., $30.00.
T
he security outside my neighborhood temple in Hyde Park, Chicago, like that around many Jewish institutions throughout the world these
days, is conspicuous, though not as rigorous as at comparable buildings in Germany, France or Sweden. But in this case
there is a special reason: Temple KAM Isaiah Israel stands just across the road from
the residence of the Obama family. The
house is rarely occupied now, but when the
Obamas lived there full-time they used to
“pal around” (to use Sarah Palin’s felicitous
expression) with the congregation’s notoriously radical rabbi, the late Arnold Wolf.
In Genesis, John B. Judis credits Wolf
with providing the future president with
“his view of Israel.” The rabbi, he says,
described himself as a “religious radical”
and a “liberal activist.” As Judis writes, he
“supported Israel’s existence, but he wanted
the Israelis to pursue policies that fully
recognized the rights of the Palestinians.”
Wolf ’s view of Israel represented “a return
Bernard Wasserstein is the Harriet & Ulrich E.
Meyer Professor Emeritus of Modern European
Jewish History at the University of Chicago.
March/April 2014 87
to the universalism of nineteenth-century
Reform Judaism.” In a confessional passage
at the outset of his book, Judis, a senior
editor at the New Republic and the author
of several well-regarded books on domestic
and foreign policy, declares his own
attraction to Wolf ’s teaching “that the role
of Jews was not to favor Jews at the expense
of other people but to bring the light of
ethical prophecy to bear upon the welfare of
all peoples.”
Reform Judaism, as Judis notes, was
historically opposed to Zionism. Yet several
of the early leaders of American Zionism,
notably Stephen Wise and Abba Hillel
Silver, were Reform Jewish clerics. Judis
traces the awkward relationship between
the universalist values of Reform Judaism
and the nationalist cause that these men
espoused. He sees a profound contradiction
between their liberal political outlooks
and their general failure to recognize the
political rights of the Palestinian Arabs. He
admits of only rare exceptions such as Judah
L. Magnes, an American Reform rabbi
who became the first head of the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem.
In some ways this is an old-fashioned
book that might have been written by
a member of the American Council for
Judaism, an association of Reform Jews,
formed in 1942, that propagandized
vigorously against Zionism in the early
years of the Jewish state (it still exists, albeit
in diminished form). The “main lesson” of
the book, Judis writes, is that “the Zionists
who came to Palestine to establish a state
trampled on the rights of the Arabs who
already lived there.”
88 The National Interest
Of course, one does not need Reform
Judaism, historical or current, as one’s
guide in order to arrive at this conclusion.
Others have reached the same destination
by different routes. Perhaps the most
effective presentation of this point of view
was written a generation ago from a Marxist
standpoint by the great French Jewish
orientalist Maxime Rodinson in his Israel:
Fait Colonial? (published in English as
Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?). Even those
who disagreed with its basic contention
(among them the pro-Israeli Jean-Paul
Sartre, who commissioned the essay in May
1967 for a special issue of his journal Les
Temps Modernes) had to recognize the power
of Rodinson’s argument, which derived
from a scrupulous welding of theoretical
framework and historical data and from an
aversion to unexamined moralizing. The
same cannot be said for Judis’s enterprise.
T
his book is divided into three parts.
The first and weakest presents a history of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine
up to 1939. “The moral contours of that
early history,” he writes, “are remarkably
clear. From the 1890s . . . until the early
1930s, the responsibility for the conflict
lay primarily with the Zionists.” Judis here
develops the proposition that British imperialism and the Zionists, using the vehicle
of the mandate for Palestine granted by the
League of Nations, “conspired to screw the
Arabs out of a country that by the prevailing standards of self-determination would
have been theirs.” (The crude wording is
not indicative of what is the generally elegant prose style of this book.)
Reviews & Essays
Liberalism, viewed historically, was not at all
incompatible with either nationalism or imperialism.
The League of Nations was itself
the supreme contemporary arbiter, in
international law and in general public
legitimacy, of international standards of
conduct. Judis is fully entitled to disagree,
albeit retrospectively, with those standards.
But he cannot simultaneously invoke and
condemn them. Yet that is, in essence, what
he does in this section of his book.
Judis’s historical knowledge is sometimes
shaky: the Jews of Palestine, he maintains,
“suffered religious persecution” under
Ottoman Turkish rule. He cites no
examples; indeed, it would be hard for
him to do so since this persecution is a
figment of his imagination. Until the
mid-nineteenth century, it is true, Jews
in the empire labored under a number of
irksome restrictions. But they also enjoyed
some privileges, including freedom from
conscription for military service and
protection by the millet system, which
accorded them communal autonomy in
several important spheres of life. In the
mid-nineteenth centur y, Jews, like
Christians, were accorded full legal equality
with Muslims. Admittedly, this did not
bring immediate social equality. But to
describe their condition in late Ottoman
Palestine as one of “religious persecution” is
quite misleading.
A number of other errors pepper
Judis’s text. Earl Curzon would have been
surprised to learn that he was the House
of Lords representative in the war cabinet.
One might as well say that President
Clinton was the saxophonists’ representative
in the White House. Vladimir Jabotinsky’s
political movement was not the National
Reviews & Essays
but the New Zionist Organization. There
are other bloopers: Saudi Arabia makes a
premature appearance in 1915; Jordan,
formed in 1946, steps on to the stage in
1919; and Guyana, born in 1966, pops up
in 1937. But these are all trivial mistakes.
Of more substantial importance is
Judis’s claim that the British attempted
“to stoke sectarian division” in Palestine.
Such an allegation is often made against
the British in relation to Jews and Arabs.
It is erroneous. But we need not pursue
that hare further here because what Judis
has in mind are relations between Muslims
and Christians, which he believes the
British deliberately sought to impair in
pursuit of a divide-and-rule policy. The
sole proof that he offers for this contention
is the fact that the British sponsored the
creation in 1921 of a “Supreme Moslem
Council.” But there is no credible evidence
in the archives of the British or Palestine
governments, neither of which Judis has
consulted, nor anywhere else, that would
substantiate such a characterization of the
motives of the British in establishing this
body. In reality, as all concerned recognized,
some such body was urgently required at
the start of the mandate for straightforward
practical and legal reasons in order to
administer Muslim religious endowments
and institutions in the wake of the demise
of the Ottoman state.
S
uch errors undermine the reader’s confidence in Judis’s historical understanding and judgment, but they do not fundamentally shake his argument. The real
problem is that Judis’s thesis is based on
March/April 2014 89
unexamined principles. He lays great stress
on the doctrine of national self-determination, which, he reminds us, was given
memorable expression in President Wilson’s
Fourteen Points address of January 1918—
though, by the way, the precise term does
not appear there. Judis asserts that early
American Zionists, who were mainly liberals, had a blind spot when it came to
the political rights of Palestinian Arabs.
He points out that men like Justice Louis
Brandeis, champions of the rights of laboring men and black people at home, tended
to dismiss Arab rights in Palestine as of
no great account. As a matter of historical
peacemakers at the Paris Peace Conference
of 1919 also thought that this concept was
a supreme guiding light. But what they
failed, for the most part, to reckon with
was the hotchpotch intermingling of ethnic
groups in many of the areas in which they
were engaged in drawing borders. Just two
decades later such certitude dissolved in
the crises over the Sudetenland, the Polish
Corridor and Danzig. The murder of six
million Jews during the Second World
War and the expulsion thereafter of twelve
million Germans from areas of Eastern
Europe where their ancestors had, for the
most part, lived for many generations,
description, he is quite right. But what he
draws from this is more questionable.
In the first place, his argument rests on
the assumption that the doctrine of selfdetermination offered a mechanical
solution to all nationality problems. Here
he is in good company, since many of the
put paid to the idea that national selfdetermination, tempered by international
protection of minorities, was any kind
of panacea. If any confirmation of that
lesson were required, it was furnished by
the events that followed the breakup of
Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
90 The National Interest
Reviews & Essays
The trouble with self-determination on
a territorial basis was that the outcome
inevitably depended on the precise area to
which it was to be applied. Irish nationalists
demanded freedom from British rule over
all of Ireland—ignoring the political rights
of the Unionist majority in the northern
part of the island. One could point to
similar problems in almost every region
of the world, particularly in territories
formerly under imperial control, among
them Palestine, that achieved independence
after the Second World War.
Ethnic intermingling was not the only
problem. There was the related difficulty
of defining the national group that was
to be granted self-determination. Take
Scotland. If Scots have such a right, the
question immediately arises: Who is a Scot?
In the referendum on independence to be
held in Scotland in September of this year,
all residents of that country over the age
of sixteen will be able to exercise a vote.
But many—perhaps a majority—of those
voters are settlers from England, Ireland
and Bangladesh, or descendants of such
settlers over the past couple of centuries. Is
it reasonable that they should have a say in
this matter while most Scots living abroad
have no say at all?
What that example shows is that there
is a further difficulty contained within
the concept of self-determination, that of
indigenity. According to the principle of
national self-determination, as generally
understood by its advocates, a significant
criterion for the exercise of national
political rights is place of birth. That is
why Judis believes that a great political
Reviews & Essays
wrong was done to the Palestinians when
they were denied by Zionism the ability to
determine their own destiny in their own
land.
But are such rights heritable? Certainly,
most Palestinian Arab nationalists and their
supporters think so. Third- and fourthgeneration inhabitants of Lebanon, Jordan
and Syria still think of themselves not only
as Palestinians but also as refugees with an
inherent right of return.
How long do such rights inhere? The
great majority of so-called Palestinian
refugees were not, after all, themselves
driven out of their homes in 1948. If
Palestinians’ rights as refugees are heritable
through the generations, is there some
end point, or does that right endure, as
Palestinian nationalists claim? Judis, while
remaining silent on the issue of a right
of return for the Palestinians, expresses
eloquent sympathy for their plight:
Israel’s Jews had gained a world of their own
but at the expense of another people. History,
of course, often works that way. And if the people who are vanquished disappear, or are relatively weak and few in number, the victors can
eventually lay aside the memory of what they
have done. Few Georgians today remember
or regret having driven the peaceful Cherokee
Indians off their lands.
Pe r h a p s t h e C h e ro k e e s a n d t h e
Palestinian refugees deserve to have
inherited rights recognized (let us leave
aside, for the moment, which rights and
in what form). But if so, does that not pull
the rug out from under one of the chief
March/April 2014 91
complaints that is made against Zionism
by its critics, including Judis—namely, that
the Jewish claim to Palestine is based on
an illegitimate appeal to inherited ancestral
rights of residence and ownership? Does not
Judis—as much as those he attacks—want
to have it both ways?
thinks he has discovered the mote
J udis
in the eye of the early American Zionists. He observes that while they were for
the most part liberals in American politics,
they were at the same time adherents of an
ethnonationalist creed when it came to their
ancestral homeland. He thinks the two positions are inconsistent.
They may be inconsistent, but they are
not necessarily irreconcilable. What of
the Italian Americans who were part of
the Roosevelt coalition yet shamelessly
acclaimed Mussolini? One of the main
thoroughfares in Chicago is, to this day,
named after Italo Balbo, the fascist aviator,
brutal squadrista and colonial governor
of Libya. (Conveniently for the purposes
of political road naming, he fell out with
Il Duce and died in an air crash before
the outbreak of the Second World War.) I
doubt any appeal for renaming to Mayor
Rahm Emanuel would meet with success.
And what of those Irish Americans,
a similarly solid Democratic voting bloc
for many decades, who funded and
propagandized on behalf of the terrorists
of the ira, hardly liberals by any stretch of
definition?
Contrary to Judis’s view, liberalism,
viewed historically, was not at all
incompatible with either nationalism or
92 The National Interest
imperialism. Herbert Samuel, the first
British high commissioner in Palestine
under the mandate, was one of liberalism’s
foremost theorists at the turn of the last
century and yet a stout imperialist. Judis
examines his record in Palestine, partly on
the basis of a reading of my biography of
Samuel. He asserts (here in no way reliant
on my book) that Samuel “didn’t subscribe
to the view of empire as an instrument of
subduing and civilizing barbarous peoples.”
Actually, Samuel came close to believing
exactly that. So much is evident from his
earliest involvement in imperial issues,
when he supported Roger Casement in his
denunciation of King Leopold’s murderous
policies in the Congo in 1904. As home
secretary twelve years later, he gave further
expression to that view when he granted
final approval for the hanging of Casement,
who had evolved into an activist on behalf
of his version of national self-determination
in Ireland.
The second and shortest part of Judis’s
book explores the early history of American
Zionism, particularly in its relationship
to Reform Judaism. In some effective and
psychologically perceptive passages, Judis
portrays the conflict of personalities and
policies between Stephen Wise and Abba
Hillel Silver for control over the American
Zionist movement.
But then we quickly move on to part
three, which focuses on the years 1945
to 1948, with a special emphasis on the
influence of the Zionist lobby over the
policies of the Truman administration. In
this period, Judis contends, after a brief era
of ethical uplift during the Second World
Reviews & Essays
War, the Zionists again descended into
moral turpitude.
President Harry Truman, he shows, flipflopped repeatedly in his attitude toward
the Palestine question, as he gave way first
to this, then that pressure group. There is
some merit in this interpretation, but not
much that will be new to readers familiar
with the existing scholarly literature; for
example, the works on the subject by Zvi
Ganin and Michael J. Cohen.
Judis applauds the efforts of American
Jews such as Magnes who opposed the
movement toward U.S. support for the
creation of a Jewish state. He suggests that
if, in 1946, the Truman administration
had exhibited more resistance to Zionist
pressure, and if the United States had
supported the peacemaking efforts in
Palestine of the British foreign secretary
Ernest Bevin and if the Zionist leadership
had been ready to postpone any demand
for independence, then “the Arab states
might have been able to persuade their
Palestinian colleagues to go along.” This
chain of conditional clauses points, of
course, to the improbability of such an
outcome, which Judis himself is constrained
to admit “may sound implausible.” Yet he
is not discouraged. A little later he opines,
writing now of the background to the
1947 partition vote at the United Nations,
that “the Arab leaders might even have
eventually accepted a small Jewish state.”
There are many might-have-beens in the
history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but these
two are among the more fanciful.
Undeniably there are some parallels
between the irresolution of the Truman
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administration and that of the Obama
administration in their policies toward the
Middle East. The tergiversation last year over
intervention in the Syrian civil war is a case
in point. But Judis goes further, postulating
not merely analogy but genealogy.
Indeed, the central argument of his book
is that there is lineal descent: Judis traces
the origin of the “pattern of surrender
to Israel and its supporters” back to the
Truman years. Truman’s failure to impose
a just settlement in Palestine, he writes,
“established a pattern that plagued
his successors.” This is extrapolation
masquerading as explanation.
The underlying argument does not carry
conviction. After all, Israel received scant
March/April 2014 93
support from the United States during the
Eisenhower administration, when its main
great-power protector and arms supplier was
not the United States but France. Dwight
Eisenhower himself was distinctly hostile to
the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt
in the autumn of 1956, and it was American
pressure that compelled the Israeli prime
minister, David Ben-Gurion, to pull Israeli
troops out of every inch of Sinai as well as
the Gaza Strip by early 1957. The Kennedy
administration began selling limited
quantities of advanced weaponry to Israel,
but it was only after the 1967 Six-Day War
that the United States became Israel’s main
diplomatic patron and armament provider.
T
he pro-Israel lobby, of which Judis
is highly critical, is unquestionably
powerful, but it is not and has never been
omnipotent. Judis exaggerates, for example,
when he writes that the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee (aipac) was “instrumental” in the defeat in 1984 of Illinois
senator Charles Percy by his Democratic
challenger Paul Simon; aipac’s hostility
was merely one element in Senator Percy’s
downfall.
Moreover, aipac cannot always prevent
an American administration from applying
unwelcome pressure on Israel. In March
1975, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger
announced the failure of his mission to
secure a second agreement between Israel
and Egypt regarding the Sinai Peninsula.
Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was
refusing to budge from his position that
an Israeli military presence must remain at
the strategically vital Mitla and Gidi Passes
94 The National Interest
in central Sinai. President Gerald Ford,
“mad as hell” at what he regarded as Israeli
“stalling,” announced a “reassessment” of
American policy toward the Jewish state.
Over the next six months the Americans
refused to sign any new arms deals with
Israel. The Israel lobby organized frantic
activity on Capitol Hill. Seventy-six
senators were strong-armed into signing
a letter of protest to the president. The
episode is often cited as an example of
the power of the pro-Israel lobby. What
is not so well remembered is that the
U.S. pressure on Israel in fact worked.
In September 1975, further exhaustive
mediation by Kissinger produced an IsraeliEgyptian agreement on Sinai and the Suez
Canal. Rabin ate his words and reluctantly
agreed to withdraw Israeli troops from
Mitla and Gidi in return for face-saving
U.S. commitments. This was no passing
episode. The agreement paved the way for
the secret talks that led ultimately to the
Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty of 1979.
Judis tries conscientiously to analyze
the different segments of opinion among
American Jews but in the end he succumbs
to the tendency to lump most of them in
the category of donkey-like followers of
guidance from Jerusalem central.
Yet, as a recent Pew Research Center
survey has shown, American Jewry is
differentiating, diversifying and, in
important ways, disintegrating further
and faster than ever before. Institutions
like Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist
Organization—once the largest Jewish
membership society in the country—are
shadows of their former selves. The once-
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The pro-Israel lobby, of which Judis is
highly critical, is unquestionably powerful,
but it is not and has never been omnipotent.
powerful Conference of Presidents of
Major American Jewish Organizations no
longer carries much clout. And the Jewish
federations in major cities are declining in
significance.
When contemplating the declining
figures for synagogue membership, I am
reminded of the old joke about the editor
of a Yiddish newspaper in New York who,
looking out of the window and noticing a
funeral procession file past, calls out to the
manager of his printing press, “One copy
fewer today!”
Jewish institutionalism has given way
to Jewish individualism. This is true
particularly among young adults who are
ever less inclined to allow themselves to
be mobilized for causes over which they
have no control and in which they show
decreasing interest.
Judis accords American Jewish influence
a heavy share of responsibility for Israel’s
continued retention of occupied Arab
territories. Yet according to the Pew survey,
only 30 percent of American Jews describe
themselves as “very attached” to Israel. And
only 17 percent believe that continued
building of settlements has a positive
effect on Israel’s security, while 44 percent
declared that it hurts that security.
Many American Jews do, of course,
support Israeli hawkishness, and some
make noisy, self-advertising contributions
to bolstering the occupation. Sheldon
Adelson, a Las Vegas casino operator, has
given millions to far-right causes in Israel
and is the owner of the ultranationalist
Yisrael Hayom, perhaps the country’s most
widely circulated newspaper. (It is given
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away for free.) He recently called for the
United States to launch a nuclear weapon
into the middle of the Iranian desert. Irving
Moskowitz, a Miami real-estate developer,
has been an important financial backer
of Jewish settlements in inflammatory
locations, such as Arab-inhabited quarters
of Jerusalem. (He also helped bankroll
the “birther” movement against President
Obama.) The head of the Anti-Defamation
League, Abraham Foxman, has been so
ardent an apologist for Israeli policies that
a writer in the liberal Israeli newspaper
Haaretz satirically recommended last year
that he be appointed U.S. secretary of state.
(He is unlikely to accept any such offer: he
would have to take a significant cut in his
salary, which in 2012 was $688,280.)
But such figures are not generally
representative of those for whom they claim
to speak. There are plenty of American
Jews who have played a positive role in the
search for Arab-Israeli peace. Even those
who like to malign Kissinger can hardly
deny the supple cunning of his diplomacy
in the first steps toward Israeli-Egyptian
rapprochement after the 1973 Yom Kippur
War. In recent years American diplomats
who happen to be Jewish (and perhaps it is
not just happenstance) such as Dennis Ross,
Aaron David Miller, Martin Indyk and
Daniel Kurtzer (a former dean of Yeshiva
College in New York) have tried to nudge
Israel toward more realistic policies.
In fact, on every significant occasion
in its history when Israeli policy makers
have moved decisively toward more dovish
positions, the preponderant weight of
American Jewish opinion has shown
March/April 2014 95
support, as, for example, when Israel and
the Palestinians signed the Oslo accords on
the White House lawn in September 1993.
writes fluently and forthrightly,
J udis
but other authors have made a more
persuasive case of a similar sort. John
Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt stole a
march on him with their (flawed) 2007 onslaught against the American Jewish lobby,
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.
In The Crisis of Zionism, Peter Beinart preceded Judis’s call for a more critical view of
Israeli policy on the part of American Jews.
Most recently, last year Ari Shavit, in My
Promised Land, produced an influential,
revisionist critique of Israel’s conventional
history and of what he calls “the abnormality of occupation.”
96 The National Interest
Does all this mean, then, that the basic
thrust of Judis’s conclusions is wrong? Not
at all. Israel must, in pursuit of her own
interests as a democracy, withdraw from
the stance of colonial occupier that she
has misguidedly adopted since 1967. The
United States has no interest in supporting
those in Israel who wish to perpetuate
the occupation. American Jews, insofar
as they give their voices, their money or
their political influence to help sustain the
occupation, do neither themselves nor Israel
any favors. But we did not need dubious
historical linkage between the Obama
and Truman administrations nor shallow
invocations of liberalism, universalism and
national self-determination to arrive at these
conclusions. Judis is right but for the wrong
reasons. n
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